Written by: Nick G. on 6 March 2025
(Above: Salmon farms off Bruny Island. Source: Environmental Defenders Office)
In a move that caught environmentalists by surprise, PM Albanese has intervened in a controversy over salmon farming in western Tasmania’s Macquarie Harbour by promising to weaken environmental laws to guarantee the future of the industry. Albanese wrote to industry owners in February promising to “introduce legislation to ensure appropriate environmental laws are in place to continue sustainable salmon farming in Macquarie Harbour”.
Last November, Albanese injected a further $28 million into the industry to improve oxygenation levels in the harbour following a request by conservation groups to Environment Minister Plibersek to reassess salmon farming approvals under the Environmental Protection and biodiversity Conservation Act.
Their concern was the future of the endangered Maugean skate – a stingray-like creature whose only known habitat is in the harbour. Studies had shown its numbers were falling due to low oxygen levels in harbour waters caused by the salmon pens. Another $9 million of federal funds is to assist a skate captive breeding program. This money too, should come from the companies threatening the skates’ existence.
Albanese’s intervention has effectively sunk the expected decision by Plibersek’s department to raise the skate’s threatened species level from endangered to critically endangered. Their decision has been postponed until after the federal election.
Public concern over the nature of salmon farming
Concerns over salmon farming – the raising and harvesting of fish from large pens located in open sea water – are as old as the salmon farms, but the publication in 2021 by Penguin Books of respected novelist Richard Flanagan’s Toxic – The Rotting Underbelly of the Tasmanian Salmon Industry gave opponents of the farms the ammunition they needed for a widespread campaign. Some people claimed that Flanagan’s devastating exposé of the industry, with its destructive practices, diseases and fish kills, and use of synthetic chemicals to dye the fish flesh, had put them off eating salmon forever.
The main problem with salmon pens is that they let fish faeces and food waste fall directly onto the ocean floor where the build-up of excess nutrients can destroy marine ecosystems. It can lead to harmful algal blooms that reduce oxygen levels in the water killing fish on the pens and marine life in adjacent waters. Diseases associated with fish in poor health are then treated with hundreds of kilograms of antibiotics which leach into surrounding waters. There they are taken in by wild fish above the allowable level for human consumption. Use of broad-spectrum antibiotics for particular fish diseases, rather than safer vaccines, could lead to antimicrobial resistance beyond the target bacteria. Despite these problems, the Tasmanian government is proposing to increase the area of permitted significant environmental impacts on sea floors under salmon farms from the current 35 metres by an extra 100 metres of legally permitted pollution.
Driven by profits and returns to overseas shareholders, the 3 foreign companies in the industry have been allowed to self-report to the Tasmanian Environmental Protection Authority and have concealed reports on nutrients, fish deaths and fish escapes, diseases and antibiotics. Lack of transparency, of secrecy, is a matter of great concern to Tasmanians.
Multinationals served by government
Tasmanian salmon farming is entirely in the hands of three foreign multinationals. They are Tassal, owned by Canadian company Cooke Inc, since 2022; Huon Aquaculture, owned by notorious Brazilian meat processors JBS, since November 2021; and Petuna Seafoods, 50% owned by Maori nations and 50% by Japanese Nissui.
According to Tax Office data, the companies have paid no tax since 2019.
However, both the Tasmanian and federal governments are bending over backwards to ensure these foreign companies are not placed on an endangered list. From reworking and weakening environmental protection laws, to injecting public funds to save these private companies to have to clean up their own mess, to hiding all of this under a professed concern for jobs – it all comes down to governments in open service to capitalism.
The industry has claimed greater numbers of jobs than really exist. The Australia Institute has criticised the figures based on census data and has been supported by Tasmanian Senator Jaqui Lambi who described industry figures as “bullshit” saying that “It’s all robotics. It’s just feed. They carry on. They overestimate.”
And on the other side of Tasmania…
Just three days after Albanese’s letter of support for the Macquarie Harbour fish farmers, the companies kicked an amazing own goal in south-eastern waters between Bruny Island and regions south of Hobart.
On February 20, masses of salmon carcasses and globules of rotted fish fat washed up on the southern beaches. This was despite large quantities of dead fish taken from pens and dumped in landfill east of Hobart.
Alistair Allan, Greens candidate for Lyons in the forthcoming federal election said, “This is now solid proof that the industry has completely lost control of the disease outbreak that is causing so much death and suffering on these factory fish farms.”
Jacqui Lambie, characteristically, says that she has had a gutful of the salmon industry, and said it must stop its Macquarie Harbour operations and either move further out to sea and transfer to land-based tanks, with the federal funding better spent on supporting the deployment of affected workers.
“You’ve made more than enough money off the arse of Tasmania. Move it on,” she said.
Postscript: Prize Catch
Capitalism’s destructive war on nature, its profit-driven disregard for the environment, its secrecy and corruption were brilliantly captured last year in Alan Carter’s novel Prize Catch, published by Fremantle Press. Needing to facilitate a takeover by a foreign company, a Bruny Island salmon farmer employs SAS war criminals blooded in Afghanistan (under the control of a very Ben Roberts-Smith type leader) to undertake a campaign of murder and intimidation of local environmentalists. Police corruption assists their endeavours. It’s as good as Australian crime fiction gets.
