Millions of hectares of pristine marine wilderness around Australia would be protected immediately, supertrawlers would be banned and millions of dollars would be invested in shark research under a new set of marine policies released by the Greens on Wednesday.
“Australia is incredibly proud of our unique marine ecosystems, yet they are at risk from climate change, overfishing, oil and gas production and other challenges,” the Greens senator Rachel Siewert said.
In 2012 the then-Labor government established the world’s largest network of marine reserves that restricted access to oil and gas industries and aimed to protect food and environmental resources.
When the Coalition was elected in 2013, a review of the management plans was announced, putting on hold all the protections the marine reserves would have created.
“Since then, while the reserves have undergone ‘review’, the marine parks have become simply lines on the map,” Siewert said.
The Greens’ policy would immediately protect the reserves, at a cost of $66m, and would compensate displaced fisheries with a further $69.5m.
The reserves would have varying levels of restrictions on fishing in the waters of every coastal state and territory in Australia, as well as limiting other activities like oil and gas drilling.
In New South Wales, the reserves would include the Lord Howe Island marine reserve, which has important habitats for humpback whales and is a major breeding ground for seabirds.
In South Australia, the marine reserves would stop recreational and commercial fishing in large parts of the Great Australian Bight, and stop any new mining activities there.
The set of policies also commits $2.5m to protecting sharks from finning and $6m to further researching sharks, which Siewert said would help their conservation, and also protect humans from interactions with them.
“If we are going to develop the strongest non-lethal shark mitigation strategies we need to understand sharks as best as possible. We can keep ocean users safe without culling an apex predator that is essential to marine ecosystem health; the more we know about sharks the better,” Siewert said.
The party also announced a commitment to provide $8m for coral bleaching research, including $2m for the CSIRO.
Finally, the marine policy applies mandatory country of origin labelling to seafood, allowing consumers to make informed decisions about where their seafood is from, and would ban supertrawlers.
