Tasmania’s failure on Marine Parks is complete

Our failure to protect our ocean wilderness is just a symptom of our failure to find an effective way to talk through any modern challenge.

Under the Convention on Biological Diversity, States promised to establish systems of marine parks (MPAs) by 2020. However, by 2009 the process in Tasmania had already stalled. Millions of dollars of Federal money was given to Tasmania to roll out a marine parks strategy, but the work was never finished. As the year ends we still have no or inadequate marine parks in many regions.

When the Kent Group in Bass Strait was proposed for an MPA, the affected parties got together and worked out a compromise. Environmentalists had to give up a larger proposal. Professional fishermen didn’t like it either, but they were willing to talk and make concessions.

Then there were proposals for MPAs in South East Tasmania, closer to a major city, and the entire strategy collapsed. Marine parks went from enjoying relatively broad support to a sudden “not in my back yard” overreaction, especially from a few more vocal recreational fishermen of the time.

Despite a planning tribunal taking hundreds of submissions and spending millions of dollars, an announcement came from the then Minister, David Llewellyn, that he was going to ignore the findings.

Rumours filtered back that one Ministerial meeting with a single but very vocal group of recreational fishermen had decided it. All the other interest groups who had been faithfully negotiating a more moderate settlement were pushed aside. All commitment to an open public process collapsed. No-one needed to make compromises, or even participate, if all you needed was the ear of a fearful Minister.

The mainstream parties sabotaged their own policies to win short-term support from recreational fishermen prior to an election. What we got instead were some “sham parks” in the south-east with no protections against the primary threats those areas.

Today, you will struggle to find a map showing where these sham parks are, even on the National Parks and Wildlife Service website.

As soon as the ‘sham parks’ were announced, a political race was on. Who could distance themselves from marine park proposals the quickest? There was a Hodgman Liberal Government moratorium on further MPAs. Disinterest or even hostility from the ALP followed. Even the Greens have been quiet on the subject for the last 14 years, seemingly giving up on it as a lost cause. Today, its hard to find anyone who is still actively pushing the idea of marine parks. Even scientists will quietly talk of “spatial management” instead of using the dreaded word “marine park”, in case they lose favour with influential interests.

The ocean is Tasmania’s greatest wilderness by far, eclipsing anything we have on land. Ironically, small areas of Tasmania’s land-based wilderness have received enormous attention while the rest remains “out of sight and out of mind”. A State that sells goods and services like tourism, based on its clean green natural image, needs to deal with these kinds of issues seriously. We still need to protect areas of the ocean for their wilderness values. Not a lot of areas, just some. We need to protect them, then capitalise on them by making them part of our tourism pitch. Calling an area a marine park advertises its iconic status and encourages interest in the surrounding area.

Some other areas need to be protected from human impacts, just because they are rare and special, a part of our natural inheritance that we need to pass on to future generations. The relatively minor impacts on fishing caused by preserving these small areas, does not warrant the amount of emotional energy spent on fending off discussion about marine parks.

Why is “marine park” such a dirty word? We have very few marine parks that have ‘no fishing’ zones. They make up less than 6 percent of Tasmanian State waters. That figure halves if you don’t count sub-Antarctic Macquarie Island, 1500 kilometres away. They will never be big enough to materially impact on professional fishermen. Often they are in remote areas anyway, or along coastal rocky foreshores that often aren’t even productive for local fishermen.

Even I would admit that marine parks are a secondary priority to environmental and economic issues like climate change. I’d accept that the legal framework for marine parks could even do with an update, but what hope do we have for resolving any thorny issue, if we can’t even talk about something so small?

The real problem for Tasmanians is that we have lost the art of dialogue and compromise, the real power of a democracy. We often quickly break up into warring groups and engage in “culture wars”. Everyone is then labelled as a “greenie”, “redneck”, “townie”, or “hillbilly” on every social or environmental issue. Political discourse can often be governed by the rules of the internet rant. We do not have the patience to understand or respond to ideas we do not instantly agree with.

Even our professional politicians seem frightened to take a leadership stance on a difficult issue. I get the impression that even if our elected members thought it was worthwhile, no-one in Parliament would want to touch such a potentially divisive issue. The real problem for our community is that every issue in this era is potentially divisive.

Modern politics seems to be mesmerised by an obsession with squeezing increasingly wafer thin voting margins from a largely disinterested society. There seems to be no strategy for resolving issues once people get cemented into their opposing ‘camps’. It took an expensive national referendum to fix an obviously popular marriage law reform proposal that had already been hotly debated to a general consensus.

We might be able to live with our failure on marine parks, but the enduring failure is that we appear to be clueless about how to talk through even small social and environmental challenges.

There is another way to engage with each other. It would take a lot of thought, bravery and commitment. We would need to agree to an open discussion based on some ground rules. A post-Trump commitment to have conversations where you are allowed to get hot blooded but not hateful. We would have to rethink everything, even how we talk to people in a new digital age. We will need the patience to understand our different values, even when its clear we don’t agree.

Maybe it is time to be smarter and braver.

Michael Jacques is a local diver and coordinator of the Marine Life Network, an on-line group promoting more understanding of, and enjoyment, of the oceans.

Please contact marinelifetassie@gmail.comJ