DANIEL:

So Mike, to start with, can you tell me what the locals in south-east Tasmania discovered recently?

MIKE:

Well, it was about 9:30 on Sunday morning a little over two weeks ago when Jess Coughlan, who's a campaigner with Neighbours of Fish Farming or NOFF, she got a phone call. And it was a local calling her to say that thousands of these oily, stinky globs had washed up on Verona Sands Beach, which is about 60 kilometres south of Hobart.

The caller suspected it was fish food from one of the salmon farming pens in the area, you know, there are scores of them. And he said that his dogs, as well as flocks of gulls, were, quote, in a frenzy eating it. So anyway, Jess grabbed a jar and hastened down to the beach to grab a sample and see for herself this massive amount of globs that were scattered along the entire length of the beach. And she collected samples, intending to send them off to the state's EPA. Inter alia, she rang a contact of hers who was a retired diver. And he said, break open some of the larger clumps, and she did. And inside was pink flesh and fish scales. So it wasn't just fatty stuff, it was actual chunks of fish. She realised pretty quickly, I guess, that it wasn't fish food, obviously. It was dead rotting salmon.

DANIEL:

That's just gross, Mike.

MIKE:

Well, yeah it is. There were thousands of these things. There were small blobs of fatty stuff and there were larger chunks that were actual fish flesh.

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DANIEL:

From Schwartz Media, I'm Daniel James. This is 7am.

Warmer waters, disease, and antibiotics have pushed Tasmania’s salmon farms into crisis.

But it’s not just an environmental disaster, it’s a political one.

Now, with an election looming, the Albanese government is pouring millions into salmon farming hoping to save jobs and votes in the process, even as rotting fish litter the shore.

Today, national correspondent for The Saturday Paper, Mike Seccombe on what is happening in Tasmanian waters and why it might impact the upcoming election.

It’s Monday, March 3.

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DANIEL:

Mike, you've been looking into the salmon industry in Tasmania and how it's likely to impact the upcoming election. So can you tell me what you specifically set out to investigate?

MIKE:

Well, funny story, I actually started to look at the Albanese government's recent announcements of funding to prop up salmon farming at Macquarie Harbour on the west coast of Tasmania, where Labor is trying to win the seat of Braddon.
But events very quickly redirected me elsewhere down to the southeast corner of the state and to the seat of Franklin.

The southeast of Tasmania produces the bulk of farmed salmon in Tasmania and in the nation. It's a billion-dollar industry, it produces roughly 800,000 tonnes of fish a year. We hear a lot about Macquarie Harbour because of the, you know, threat of the extinction of the Maugean skate, but it only accounts for about 10% of production. The South East has hundreds of pens floating around holding millions upon millions of fish.

And the seat that I wound up being more interested in is the seat of Franklin, which is one of the few Labor held seats being targeted by Climate 200 in this election. Mostly they go after Liberal held seats. And Franklin is also the only one held by a current cabinet minister, that is Julie Collins the Minister for Agriculture and, importantly, Fisheries. And against her is running a number of candidates, including a Green, but the interesting one is Peter George.

He's got a bit of a profile. He's a former senior reporter for the ABC. A lot of people would remember him from Four Corners and Foreign Correspondent. He's also the founder of a group called Neighbours of Fish Farming. which is a group that's been campaigning against the industrial fish farming in Tasmania for about a decade. And that's essentially what's gonna be George's pitch running as an independent for this election. That was one of the interesting things that shifted my focus, but the bigger one was that I started hearing about a bizarre and frankly gross thing that was happening on some beaches in the Southeast in the electorate of Franklin.

Audio Excerpt - News Reporter:

“A shoreline discovery causing a stink.”

Audio Excerpt - Unidentified Witness:

“There were chunks of what appear to be salmon flesh, partially broken down, very, very oily.”

DANIEL:

So it became pretty clear pretty quickly that this was dead rotting salmon. So where were these globs coming from?

MIKE:

They're the result of what happens when salmon die. They sink to the bottom of the pens, they rot, and then their flesh and oil rise back up to the surface, and that appears to be what happened here. As to where they came from, Jess Coughlan and her other activist friends suspected they came from a farm being operated by Huon Aquaculture, which is one of the two big producers of Atlantic salmon in Australia. And sure enough, later that day, workers from Huon Aquaculture turned up at the beach and began cleaning it up, although she says they didn't actually identify themselves, they weren't in uniform or anything, and they wouldn't answer any questions that the locals put to them.

But it wasn't just Verona Sands. Remains continued washing up on other beaches too, both on the mainland side of the channel and also on Bruny Island, which is just across the other side of the channel. And there employees from the other big aquaculture company, Tassal, were witnessed cleaning up the mess.

DANIEL:

Right, so there might've been something bigger going on here than just an accident at one particular salmon farm.

MIKE:

It would appear to be the case, and it would appear that it wasn't just fish in one of the scores of pens that dot the channel, it was more widespread than that. But even before then there were signs that something major was going wrong, because a week prior Huon Agriculture had revealed that it was using antibiotics at one of its sites near Bruny Island. And then on February 14, the Bob Brown Foundation released drone footage of hundreds of dead and decomposing fish being vacuum pumped from a pen well to the north near the Tasmanian Peninsula. By then it was pretty obvious that some kind of major incident had happened, probably a disease outbreak, but for a week, maybe longer, neither the Tasmanian Environmental Protection Agency nor the companies involved provided much in the way of detail about what was happening.

DANIEL:

So when did we start getting answers, Mike?

MIKE:

Well, it took a while. Under pressure from environmentalists and the media, the Tasmanian EPA put out a statement on the Friday after the Sunday where the when the fish started turning up and it was pretty anodyne. Frankly, it just said they'd start an investigation into how, quote, a quantity of biological material had washed up at Verona Sands.

DANIEL:

So that's not much of an answer at all, is it?

MIKE:

No, it's not. So I put some questions to the EPA and they provided a little more detail. They said that there had been unusually warm water over recent months and there had been a proliferation of pest species that can irritate salmon gills.

But the thing that appears to be actually killing the fish is something called Rickettsia, which is a bacteria, and it appears to have broken out in one or more pens and quickly spread. And according to the EPA, the particular strain of this bacteria that's affecting the salmon is endemic to Australia. And for that reason, they say it's not a danger to native species. But opponents of the industry aren't so sure about that, whether it is in fact an endemic species and in any case whether having these millions upon millions of salmon there as a sort of pool potentially of the bacteria couldn't still lead to deaths among native species.

The other that they confirmed was that the companies were dumping large quantities of dead fish into landfills, which is significant because in the usual course of events when there are deaths in the fish pens, the dead fish get turned into either pet food or fertiliser. But in this case, there were clearly too many for that purpose, so they had to go to the last resort which was just dumping them.

DANIEL:

What do we know about the scale of this recent die-off?

MIKE:

It's huge. The peak body for the Tasmanian salmon industry, which is called Salmon Tasmania, I found actually more forthcoming than the EPA. I spoke to its CEO, Luke Martin, and he confirmed that they were dealing with, and I'm quoting him here, unprecedented mortalities in the South East. He didn't give exact numbers, but he did say that the normal, as he put it, summer mortality rate for salmon farms was about 5%. Given the scale of production in Tasmania, that equates to several thousand tonnes of dead fish.

Activists, not surprisingly, have been more keen to hazard estimates of the numbers. The Bob Brown Foundation's Alastair Allen, who's not only a campaigner for Bob Brown Foundation but also a Greens candidate for another seat in Tasmania, he said that industry sources had told him that two million fish had died in just a couple of weeks.

I also spoke to Peter George. The boat that his contact worked on had pumped 70 tonnes of dead fish and fish parts, and that it was just one of 13 pump boats working in the area at the time. So based on those numbers, he estimates hundreds of thousands of fish were being removed on a daily basis. These are astonishing numbers.

DANIEL:

After the break, the political washup.

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DANIEL:

Mike, this is all happening in the lead up to an election and the Prime Minister Anthony Albanese visited Tasmania to cement his support for the industry, even enjoying a plate of grilled salmon at a community barbecue. So how is all this playing out politically?

MIKE:

Well, first observation, exquisitely bad timing on Albanese's part. I suppose he couldn't foresee that there would be this kind of catastrophe in the industry. But you're right, it is becoming a big political issue in a couple of ways. We're talking about two electorates here, quite different electorates. There's Franklin, a large progressive cohort there. I think the Greens at the last election got 15, 16, 17% of the vote and Labor holds it by, what appears on paper, to be a reasonably comfortable margin. And of course, there Peter George is running as a community independent against Julie Collins, Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry.

Audio Excerpt - Peter George:

“We're getting a two-party system that has frankly delivered an environmental mess, has delivered us with an environmental crisis, and has delivered us a cost of living crisis.”

MIKE:

Peter George could potentially have been a threat to Julie Collins, even before this fish started washing up on the beaches, one would have to think that his vote probably goes up proportionate to the number of fish that turn up rotting on the beaches. That's the South East. Then we have Braddon up in the North West which is a much more conservative seat. It's currently held by a Liberal member, but he's retiring at the election and the government is hoping they can flip it. They're running a pretty high profile candidate, Anne Urquhart, who's currently a Senator for Tasmania. She's hoping she can make the shift to the lower house.

And of course, Albanese was in Braddon, tucking into the salmon and potatoes, even as the fish were turning up dead on the beaches in the southeast. He was announcing a further $2.9 million in funding for a captive breeding programme for the Maugean skate, which is in danger of extinction. And of course one of the key reasons why the Maugean skate is endangered is because of salmon farming in Macquarie Harbour. Essentially there were two principal problems affecting the skate. One was low oxygen levels and the other was large quantities of fish poo, which both affect the skates which feed at the bottom of the harbour.

So the government has been spending money not only on this captive breeding programme, but also on technology that pumps what they call micro-bubbles into the water to try and lift the oxygen levels. And in total, so far, this support has cost $37 million. And to be fair, there's some evidence that there's been a bit of success. A recent study found that oxygen levels had increased and that the skate population had stabilised, although still at pretty low numbers. But anyway, Albanese was down there and he was portraying the thing as a win-win situation. The skate was being protected, as were local jobs in the industry.

DANIEL:

That's a lot of commonwealth money subsidising this industry. So how many jobs are we talking about here Mike?

MIKE:

Not a lot, about 70. If you want to divide the amount of money the government's kicked in by the number of employees, that's roughly half a million dollars per employee. So anyway, I spoke to Andrew Wilkie. He represents another seat in Tasmania, the seat of Clark. He makes the point that Macquarie Harbour, where the skate lives, only accounts for about 10% of Tasmania's salmon production, 5% of the jobs. He sees what Albanese is as purely an exercise in shoring up Labor's hopes of winning the seat.

DANIEL:

So there's a calculation here that if the Albanese government is wanting to win seats in Tasmania, they need to appease this industry. But do you think it will pay off, particularly when people are seeing these images of rotten fish washing up on beaches everywhere?

MIKE:

Well, the government is certainly making the political calculation here that there's a seat to be picked up in the northwest of Tasmania. But it could potentially cost them the seat of Franklin. When I asked Julie Collins' office for a comment about the outbreak, about this crisis unfolding in her electorate in the salmon industry, a spokesperson declined to talk about it. The only thing they would say was they stressed that salmon farming is regulated by the Tasmanian state government. One might have thought that as the local member, if not as fisheries minister, Collins would take an interest but apparently not.
There is a bigger picture here too, I think a global picture, and that is that around the world we see offshore salmon farming starting to look like a sunset industry. Across the world from Chile to Scotland, they've experienced big, big disease outbreaks. In the United States, Washington State has just banned salmon farms because of the environmental damage they do. And all around the world there's money going into actual onshore fish farming, which can be done and apparently billions of dollars are being spent on it, and that avoids a lot of the environmental damage that is done by offshore farming. Frankly, it's a particularly dirty industry, huge amounts of fish poo apart from anything else, and I think it may be losing its social licence.

DANIEL:

Mike, I hope we haven't put too many people off their breakfast. Thanks for your time.

MIKE:

Thanks mate, cheers.

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DANIEL:

Also in the news today,

An extra 50 bulk-billing urgent care clinics will be in operation by mid-2026 if Labor wins re-election, the government has announced.

The plan will cost $644 million and deliver extra clinics in every state and territory, with 80% of Australians being able to access one within a 20 minute drive.

At the last election, Labor announced 50 new urgent care clinics, but went on to open 87 in this term of government.

And, Britain will lend Ukraine $4.5 billion to spend on military procurement, with the money coming from the profits on frozen Russian assets.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky over the weekend to sign the deal and emphasized his country’s ongoing support for Ukraine.

The show of support comes after an explosive meeting at the White House on Friday, where US President Trump and Vice President JD Vance accused the Ukrainian president of not being grateful for their support.

We’ll have a full breakdown of that meeting and the implications for the war in Ukraine on 7am tomorrow.

I’m Daniel James, this is 7am. Thanks for listening.

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