I rise to speak briefly on the fantastic and wonderful Great Barrier Reef. I’m one of only a few senators in this place who lives near or in the Great Barrier Reef catchment area—I think there might only be three of us; hopefully I’m not missing anybody—and I can report on how great the reef is going.
Tourism is through the roof, with lots of people, locked in Australia, coming and visiting the reef for the first time. If borders allow you to, come up and see it because it is in a fantastic state. This was confirmed two weeks ago, I think, when a report from the Australian Institute of Marine Science showed that coral cover on the Great Barrier Reef is now at near-record levels. Indeed, in my part of the world, the central part of the Great Barrier Reef, it’s basically at a record level. In the southern part, it’s at a near-record level. The northern part is back up to where it was a couple of decades ago. So don’t believe the doomsayers. There are a whole lot of people who don’t live near the reef, and some of them have never visited it, who like to talk it down and say it’s dead. This makes it a very tough life for small businesses that rely on tourism in North Queensland.
The reality on the ground is, yes, it has been a tough decade for the reef because of major cyclones and some bleaching events and crown-of-thorns starfish. But these are natural events, and the reef has recovered. It is a little alarming that these new figures only just came out before a UNESCO meeting that was deciding whether the reef was in danger. Where have these figures been? Where were those figures last year, when the Queensland government were putting crushing new regulations on farmers in North Queensland, regulations that are costing them $60,000 a year on the Queensland government’s figures? We need to get to the bottom of why there has been a cover-up on the coral cover of the reef and its real state. We know the facts now, and the facts are that the reef is looking fantastic and it has never been better.
