Enamoured by stunning footage in David Attenborough’s latest documentary series, the Australian environment minister, Greg Hunt, took it as proof that the Great Barrier Reef remained an untouched beauty.
But he might have been better off waiting to see the whole series before commenting.
“The key point that I had from seeing the first of the three parts is that, clearly, the world’s Great Barrier Reef is still the world’s Great Barrier Reef,” Hunt told the Courier Mail.
The documentary was one of “profound importance” that “Australia would rightly be proud of”, he continued, and was evidence that the reef was not facing the death that climate change scientists and environmentalists feared.
Hunt made the comments after seeing part one, which airs on the ABC on Sunday night. Had he watched the full series, however, he would have seen footage of coral bleaching and heard Attenborough describe, in the final part of the documentary, how “the Great Barrier Reef is in grave danger”.
“The twin perils brought by climate change – an increase in the temperature of the ocean and in its acidity – threaten its very existence,” Attenborough says.
“If they continue to rise at the present rate, the reefs will be gone within decades. And that would be a global catastrophe. About a quarter of the species of fish in the world spend some part of their lives in the reefs. If the reefs go, the fish will also disappear. And that could affect the livelihood and diet of human communities worldwide.”
The producer of the Great Barrier Reef series, Anthony Geffen, responded to Hunt’s comments, encouraging him to “watch the series, you know”.
“It’s like watching one of those Hollywood movies when everybody’s happy at the front and everybody’s dead at the end, and saying, ‘Well I think the family was really happy and everybody’s really good’, but you haven’t got to the end of the movie, where his whole family is lying on the floor dead,” Geffen told Guardian Australia.
Geffen said the series captured “horrific” levels of coral bleaching, which occurs when rising sea temperatures destroy the tiny marine algae that live inside corals’ tissue and provide up to 90% of the energy corals require to grow and reproduce.
“It was horrific and, obviously, we’ve been very much still in touch with the scientists and some of the areas we’ve just filmed in have been devastated by bleaching,” he said.
“And, in fact, scientists were asking for our footage so they could compare what had disappeared, which is quite extraordinary. I mean [the documentary] is only just coming out in Australia and already the footage is being used as archives to [document] the destruction of the reef.”
However, Geffen described the series, which has already aired in the UK, as “bigger than” and “above” politics.
“This series has gone out to, I think by the end of the year, a billion people or something – that’s what people should be reflecting on,” he said. “And I hope it doesn’t get hacked over by political means and ends, because it shouldn’t.”
