E&OE….
Topics: Turtle and dugong protection plan, plastic pollution in oceans
RICK BURNETT:
Joining me on the line now is our Federal Environment Minister Greg Hunt.
Thanks for your time, Minister.
GREG HUNT:
It’s a pleasure. Good morning, Rick.
RICK BURNETT:
Thank you. We’ve heard a lot of reports over the years about all sorts of smuggling of wildlife -parrots, fish, reptiles – but dugong and turtle meat. How widespread is this?
GREG HUNT:
Look, there are fairly strong and credible reports of poachers who are coming into, not just North Queensland, but also the Northern Territory and the top part of Western Australia, and poaching dugongs and turtles, transporting them for their meat. And the thing which is really infuriating a lot of the traditional owners is their good name and reputation is being used by these poachers.
And so it’s actually, a lot of indigenous elders and leaders who are saying to us, we need help in cracking down, and so what we’re doing with the $5 million funding is, firstly $2 million for an Australian Crime Commission investigation and operation to stop wildlife crime.
And then secondly, training Indigenous rangers up and down the Queensland coast so as they have the skills, they have the ability and they have the standing to really intervene on this front. They’re the ones that say, we need the support, and so we’re really happy to give it to them.
RICK BURNETT:
It seems a lot of money to be spending on, such a sort of, small area of the whole protection of the reef. I mean, it’s $5 million out of $40 million. It’s an eighth of the budget.
It’s a big quid.
GREG HUNT:
Well, all up we’re spending over the next 10 years, pretty close to $2 billion on the reef and that’s a mixture of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority and a variety of different activities. So, the Reef Trust is aimed at targeting two main things.
One is the wildlife protection of the iconic species that are in some way threatened. Dugongs and turtles are an absolutely critical part of that. And then, perhaps most significantly, the water quality coming in from, whether it’s the Fitzroy, the Burdekin or any of the other great deltas where there’s a lot of nutrients and sediment.
And if you want to improve the overall health of the reef, you target the source of the nitrogen and the nutrigen which gives rise to the crown of thorns breeding environment.
RICK BURNETT:
Yes, I can well go with that theory. That we do need to be looking at run-off from our land and from the nutrients used in farming. So, you’re saying effectively that the majority of that money, that $40 million, is going to be directed at the water that’s coming off the land and is polluting the corals.
GREG HUNT:
Correct. So, the overwhelming majority is aimed at the nutrient quality, the water quality. That’s just absolutely essential. And what we’ve seen in the last couple of years, there was an Outlook Report, a long-term reef health report card which came out only a few weeks ago. That says that there has been a progressive turnaround in water quality.
A reduction in nitrogen, which is absolutely an essential part of the problem, as well as the sediment, as well as the pesticides. That in turn will lead to better sea grass quality, which is all about breeding, and it will also lead to better coral quality. But it takes a little while to turn it around and now we want to go hard again and to reduce the run-off from some of the farming practices.
The farmers have been fantastic. They say, we want to be part of this, so up and down the Queensland coast, Indigenous leaders, farmers, they’ve really taken the lead, but they need a bit of support.
RICK BURNETT:
You can understand that a lot of Queenslanders feel rather cynical towards the Federal Government and the Campbell Newman Government about the level of protection that is being provided to the Barrier Reef and I guess, what we’re seeing now with this is positive and good work, but you would be well aware of the Abbot Point development, and the fact that the dredging there was going to be put back into the ocean, it’s now going on land, which is a terrific change of policy and you were involved in that so, congratulations on that from Queensland’s point of view.
But on the big picture, we’re also reading about pollution of our oceans by plastic at an alarming level. Can the Government have a role in some policies that would stop the amount of plastic that’s getting into the oceans both off the land in Australia as well as perhaps clean-ups? You would be well aware of the gyre out in the Pacific that is just this floating rubbish dump. What are your thoughts about that?
GREG HUNT:
Look, I think this is for me, one of the things that on my watch and in my time I would like to make a legacy. The reason is that plastics in the ocean, they’re a real and significant issue. There was a report on a lot of the stomach contents and that have been discovered within some of the great sort of coastal turtle populations of Australia and a very high percentage had ingested plastic, so, how do you do this?
Within Australia we’ve got the Green Army which is going to be engaging in a lot of coastal clean-up within Queensland. I know George Christensen in Mackay and north of there had some very, very significant proposals. We’re going ahead with those and globally what we’re looking for is a global oceans agreement aimed at protecting the high seas on two fronts.
One is again sort of open ocean, unregulated fishing where they’re sort of de-stocking, but the second is the enormous amount of marine debris and plastics and so we want to work with neighbours like Indonesia and PNG on that sort of clean-up and we’re working towards a global ocean agreement.
We’ve got the World Parks Congress in just over a month-and-a-half in Sydney, the first in ten years and one of the things we’ll look at is the idea of a global oceans agreement for these commons and to do real and practical work to try to clean-up as much of (audio skip) oceans where you have a collection of enormous volumes of plastic.
RICK BURNETT:
Yeah, it’s one of the modern world’s biggest dramas really, isn’t it? Plastic’s only really been in our consciousness for 50 years and in that 50 years, it’s become the most polluted item on the planet.
The amount of plastic going into our oceans is just phenomenal and you mention Indonesia, I mean these are countries, developing countries – Philippines, China, Vietnam, Indonesia – all of which have major coastal fronts and use plastic because they’ve got – well, they’ve got to because they haven’t got drinking water coming out of taps in lots of places.
They’ve got to drink it out of plastic. But it is creating one of the great world pollutants.
GREG HUNT:
Look, I think that’s absolutely right. And some of the most interesting discussions that I’ve had in the last few months have been with very, very serious science and environment groups that are looking at means of effectively developing ocean-going vessels that have a scooping capacity so you find the hot-spots of plastic concentration in the oceans and because of currents and eddies, there’s general spotting but a real area of concentration so you can scoop and collect them if you think of the way somebody might use a…
RICK BURNETT:
Swimming pool cleaner.
GREG HUNT:
… a net in a swimming pool to clean out the leaves. You can do this with the right sort of ocean-going vessel and this might be something that we could do with United Nations and China…
RICK BURNETT:
It is a microscopic soup though, isn’t it, Minister? Isn’t most of it a fairly microscopic soup and that it would be very difficult to sieve out the solids but I imagine that any action would be good action.
GREG HUNT:
Well, I’d put it this way. All of the microscopic particles come from whether it’s drink bottles, whether it’s detergent bottles, milk…
RICK BURNETT:
Plastic bags.
GREG HUNT:
… milk bottles, plastic bags, which start large and so if you can get them early, you can’t necessarily remove the existing microscopic particles but you can make a dramatic impact on the future. So, that’s it, so it’s really dealing with it on two fronts. The source and the existing problem and so we have to work on the source and the clean-up. Australia’s doing pretty well.
Our reduction of plastic going into the water has been quite significant, however, it can still always be much, much better and within the region, we mentioned other countries with whom we can work, whether it’s the Philippines, China, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, PNG – we will have to do a lot on that front and we’re proceeding to try to do that. It’s something that for me is a real personal passion.
RICK BURNETT:
Well, one of the biggest causes of debate has been deposits on plastic bottles. Where are we in the deposit debate at the moment and the Government I think is still holding out on a national policy. What is your view on that?
GREG HUNT:
Well, look, the way this works is that two States currently have it or Northern Territory and South Australia. Some of the other States have much stronger, what you call kerbside recycling teams, where there’s effectively a dual-bin system. They’re saying for us we’d rather stick with and enhance this than roll out a much greater dual network in shopping centres and elsewhere. So, for me I…
RICK BURNETT:
Which means a lot of education. It means getting people to change their habits and to change their practices and make sure that they do recycle.
GREG HUNT:
Yeah, so, whatever is going to work for each State, I will back. What I don’t accept is just sitting back and doing nothing and I think we can take the current situation where we have to reduce whether it’s the sediments and the nutrients going into our waters, or we reduce the hard material in terms of the plastics.
We can make a significant impact on that. We’ve just announced on Thursday, $100 million for six practical research and action centres within our universities around the country; two of which are water-based and one is going to be for tropical water quality and the other one’s going to be for temperate marine biodiversity.
So, part of their job will be to help ensure we’re not just doing research but we’re actually going, cleaning up, taking steps to reduce the run-off.
RICK BURNETT:
Well, you must feel with climate change being a hot topic all around the world now, and all of those world leaders meeting on the very subject, you must feel that you’re at the pointy end when it comes to policy-making for protecting the planet just at the moment.
How does that make you feel as a Minister of Environment that it’s a task that is beyond mankind or are we going to be able to survive?
GREG HUNT:
No, look, I am realistic about the challenge but optimistic about the things that we can do. It’s important to remember that back in the 1850s and 1860s, when there were terrible water-borne problems in the great cities of the world, in particular in Europe and North America with typhoid and cholera, what everybody was saying is, well, we’re facing an existential crisis; the British developed an entirely new sewer system, transformed the world.
This sort of thing we can do now is use technology to dramatically reduce emissions. And it’s a combination of on the one hand, cleaning up our power stations, on the other hand, encouraging energy efficiency and then also using the incredible capacity of the natural landscape to absorb in trees and soil, CO2.
Basically the CO2 problem is release of emissions from what’s been on the ground in terms of trees around the world or under the ground in terms of oil, gas or coal and the same processes can help reduce the load of emissions within the atmosphere; we can make a real difference.
RICK BURNETT:
Course the elephant in the room is that we’re going to expect a billion more people on the planet in the next ten years, that’s a 16 per cent increase in the population in ten years. How do we sustain that?
GREG HUNT:
Well, I think what you find is that as a planet, we have increased our carrying capacity enormously. As countries develop, the birth rate drop, that’s just one of the great historical facts and all of the UN predictions and the World Health Organisation, show a flattening in population growth and pretty much a stabilisation as you head towards the later parts of the century. What does that mean?
It means that our ability to grow food is increasing all of the time. What we have to be able to do, again is to harness technology; you look at a country like America, which can feed basically 300 million people with incredibly high technology; other countries which haven’t got that same technology don’t have the rate of food productivity, food productivity’s critical and all the time you can do it in a way which is reducing, not increasing the flow of nutrients in soil on – from the land into the sea. That’s just what we have to do.
RICK BURNETT:
Well, Minister, thank you for your time. I appreciate your frankness too. I’m not quite so hopeful that the population of the planet is going to flatten out but you keep that hope alive for us please.
GREG HUNT:
It’s a pleasure. I can only go on the best estimates.
RICK BURNETT:
It’s the unknown, we’re walking ourselves into the unknown, aren’t we? We’ve never been here before. We’ve got a population of seven billion and growing fast.
GREG HUNT:
Yeah. The future is always a challenge but for the majority of people in the world the standard of living is better than ever and the hope has to be that – and the action has to be to ensure that you have a fair standard of living without stealing from the succeeding generations.
RICK BURNETT:
Alrighty. Thank you.
GREG HUNT:
Ok. Thank you.
(ENDS)