An enormous snow job: Consultation on the salmon plan is all one-way with government

Conservation Trust shuns industry plan because commitments have been ditched, writes Peter McGlone

THE Tasmanian Conservation Trust is boycotting the state government’s salmon plan by refusing to make submissions on the Draft Tasmanian Salmon Industry Plan. To write a submission would be a waste of our and our supporters’ time because our concerns are not being listened to.

We announced our boycott in December when the draft salmon plan was first released.

Since then, my experience of attending two of the 10 public consultation meetings held by the Department of Natural Resources and Environment and hearing other people’s experience reinforces my commitment to the boycott.

The public meetings held around the state were truly bizarre, in terms of what was said by the department and how they were organised.

Predictably, the submissions are due on January 20, during the holiday period, as were many of the 10 public meetings. There was no meeting held at Triabunna or Orford, which is surprising given the very strong opposition to the Okehampton Bay salmon farm.

Of the nine in-person meetings, six were held in the north of the state and three in the south. I have heard of no attendees at the 10 meetings who overtly supported the salmon industry.

Many attendees asked for the public meetings to be recorded, which is becoming normal, but the department refused, citing privacy concerns. The sincerity of this claim was challenged when the department accidentally released 50 email addresses of attendees of an online webinar to other participants.

One of the key reasons the TCT boycotted the salmon-plan submissions process was the abandonment of a commitment of former minister Guy Barnett that the new salmon plan would be “underpinned” by four principles, including no net increase in the salmon industry.

What is new is that the department told us at the Hobart public meeting that the principles were only in place while the new plan was being developed and would expire when the plan was approved.

Mr Barnett repeated the commitment to the four principles over and over again but never said anything about them expiring.

The truth is the government has abandoned a clear commitment to the principles and is just fabricating a story to cover for it.

Mr Barnett’s commitment to the principle of no net expansion of the salmon industry has definitely been dropped, with the department representatives stating, at the Hobart meeting, that “the area of farms can grow”. Presumably the growth is without any limit.

One principle that was hard to squirm out of completely was the commitment by Mr Barnett to full industry cost recovery.

At the Nubeena meeting, the department representative had transformed this into “full regulatory cost recovery”. Given the gentle hands-off approach to regulation, this will not cost much. For reasons not yet explained the “Discussion Paper Towards a 10-year Salmon Plan” released in August 2022 was renamed “Draft Tasmanian Salmon Industry Plan” in November 2022.

I hadn’t noticed the dropping of the “10-year” reference until it was raised at the consultation meeting at Nubeena. The department representative said it is not a 10-year plan but just a “Tasmanian salmon industry plan”. I pressed them about this point, and they reiterated that there is no defined timeframe. They said it is to be a “dynamic” or “responsive” plan. They explained that this allowed the plan to be amended as circumstances changed.

This is very strange because the 10-year reference was in the discussion paper we commented on in August 2022 and then it disappeared in the draft plan released in November 2022 – without any acknowledgment or explanation.

The draft plan does not acknowledge the change and the department representatives could provide no information about how the plan amendment process would work. I am worried because the plan could change the day after it is finalised. All commitments in the final plan could be changed or removed through a yet-to-be-defined process and possibly with no consultation.

Following the same theme, the map included with the first salmon plan, showing areas available and not available to the industry, has been dropped with no explanation.

Consultation is all one-way with the government. They bombard us with documents that say very little and expect us to comment, but if we ask them something, they never respond. When I was writing this article, I went to the department’s website and could not believe what I found. Since the start of the salmon plan process in September 2021, the government has released 17 documents on salmon for the community to respond to. I believe this is just an enormous snow job designed to avoid attention on the failure to respond to public concerns.

Other commentators have stated that 80-90 per cent of submissions to the August 2022 discussion paper were opposed to salmon farming, but there were no changes in the draft plan to reflect this.