Tasmanian salmon industry facing a green tide of opposition

Tasmania’s booming salmon ­industry, expanding at $2 million a week as it doubles in size, fears it is threatened by rising opposition and claims it is “the next forestry industry”.

In a state often chastised as an underperforming mendicant, fish farming is a rip-roaring success, ­already worth $650m a year, ­employing thousands in regional areas, and set to be a $1 billion-plus industry by 2030.

But the rapid expansion is being met with an increasingly broad and organised opposition; a potent mix of greenies, NIMBYs, shellfish producers and tourism operators. They claim regulation is woefully inadequate and fish farms are polluting waterways.

Acting president of the ­recently formed Marine Protection Tasmania, recreational diver Grant Gaffney, said the state needed to make a stand and that fish farming was simply not appropriate for pristine waters. “For every tonne of salmon produced, they produce two tonnes of waste — that waste is going into the sea, so people don’t see it, but people like myself who dive see it killing everything,” he said. “I’m not a greenie but the salmon industry will be another Gunns Limited — it will crucify our waterways.”

Frances Bender, a salmon farming pioneer and executive ­director of Huon Aquaculture, pleaded for the community not to cut down such a successful industry on the basis of fear.

“I understand how people are fearful, because they see an industry growing so quickly, but we need to keep it in perspective — the entire industry takes up point 1 of 1 per cent of state waters,” Ms Bender said. “This industry simply didn’t exist 30 years ago. Now it’s the largest fishery by value in the country and the largest agri-biz in the state.

“Unfortunately, because Tasmania has been through these divisive (forestry) times, the community tends to think that as soon as you get larger than a cottage industry, you then have something like a tally poppy syndrome; something to be scared of, rather than proud of.”

She felt “emotional and sad” when people compared the industry with forestry and Gunns, a once dominant force that collapsed in 2012 amid dwindling markets and community opposition.

“Tasmania does not need to be put into a position where the community becomes divided again,” she said. “We have a … sustainable business.”

But there is more than emotion to the debate. The Weekend Australian can reveal the largest salmon company, Tassal Group, last year bought the leases of a mussel farm that had claimed its stock was devastated by pollution from nearby Tassal fish pens.

Dover Bay Mussels, run by Warwick and Irene Hastwell, made a submission to a Senate ­inquiry last year blaming Tassal’s operations for “brown sludge and sediment” that turned their mussels from the country’s fastest growing to the slowest, crippling the business …

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MATTHEW DENHOLM, Tasmania Correspondent, Hobart. @MatthewRDenholm