8 September 2020

Hon. Annastacia Palaszczuk

Premier of Queensland

PO Box 15185

CITY EAST  QLD  4002

Dear Premier

Re: Repeal of Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Regulations 2019

Queensland’s Great Barrier Reef is an immense treasure and multi-dimensional asset belonging to the people of Queensland.

Our beautiful reef is a spiritual asset connecting people with nature’s universal awe and wonder, an ecological asset and an enormous economic asset with vast unrealised potential value in tourism, fishing, research, healthcare, recreation and other activities.  It is a living part of Queensland, a renewable asset for generations to come.

I hope you agree that it is the duty of elected officials to work for the benefit of all citizens within their jurisdiction and that in our country governments have a duty to listen to, understand, work for, and serve the people.

On Monday 27 and Tuesday 28 July 2020 I took part in the Senate’s Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport (RRAT) inquiry into the identification of leading practices in ensuring evidence-based regulation of farm practices that impact water quality outcomes in the Great Barrier Reef, held here in Brisbane.  I was amazed yet not surprised with the answers to fundamental questions that senators asked on behalf of all Queenslanders.  Among many facts the academics presented to us about the reef, we learned that what some groups say about the reef is incorrect.  Specifically, that:

• “Cloudy water” affects only the inner reefs being three per cent of the reef and is natural.  Indeed, the portion adjacent to farm runoff is only half that, being 1.5 per cent with the other 1.5 per cent being off Cape York whose coastline is largely agriculturally undeveloped.  The cloudy water effect is natural with no effect from modern farming methods.
• Targets for pesticides near the reef and on the reef are not being exceeded and results shows there is no need for your Labor government’s most recent reef regulations.
• Middle and outer reefs are pristine and show no impact from farming.
• There is no direct evidence that dissolved nitrogen is having any effect on inshore coral reefs and certainly no effect on the middle and outer reefs;
• There have been no measurements of coral growth rate since 2005. That’s fifteen years with no data and the question this raises is – what is the basis for the Labor government’s regulations?
• Over recent decades farmers have made massive changes to farming practice, yet academics say there has been no impact from these changes and that leads logically to the conclusion that farming is having no discernible impact on the reef. Thus, there is no need for the Queensland Labor government’s reef regulations.
• The cost of the Queensland Labor government’s regulations to each farmer is or will be tens of thousands of dollars per family farm.  There is no benefit to the reef, and it will increase the price of the food we buy.

Secondly, it became clear during the inquiry that the Labor government is not meeting farmers’ needs to be heard and that agriculture seems to be a dirty word to your government.  Neither is your government meeting farmers’ and communities’ needs to be treated with respect and consideration. Farmers are understandably frustrated and angry and have lost confidence in your government because they have never been presented with the empirical scientific evidence needed to justify the changes your Labor government is imposing.

Thirdly, farmers today are environmentalists and not criminals. Farmers know that their main asset is their farm soil and they protect it. Farmers today know that the future productivity and value of their farm depends on the quality of the surrounding natural environment. Farmers know that productive farming and the natural environment have a mutually beneficial relationship, not as you portray, as being mutually exclusive.  Productive farming depends on a healthy natural environment and in turn the natural environment depends on healthy, economically productive farming communities.

These days farming must be internationally competitive, and farmers cannot afford to waste money applying fertilisers if those fertilisers run-off their farm.  Technology today places fertilisers where they are needed and no more.

In giving evidence under questioning, the Australian Institute of Marine Science, AIMS, admitted:

• “There is lots we don’t know about the Great Barrier Reef”;
• The term “Consensus Statement” may be misleading;
• “Climate change is not connected to farming”.

Your Labor government and senior public service bureaucrats seem to operate under the spell of ideologically driven activists including the notorious WWF, who are pushing their agenda to destroy Queenslanders’ rights to use their land and to destroy basic freedoms. These few activists and your government pandering to people who lack understanding of the source of their food are demonising farmers, farming and food production. You and they are doing so in contradiction of the science and in conflict with common sense.

The inquiry was told that the 30 per cent nitrogen reduction target has been modelled to cost $110 million annually for sugar cane farmers and sugar millers. Yet the science shows that this is and will be for no environmental benefit.  That means that all this pain is for no gain.

I hope that you will support my recent call for an Office of Scientific Integrity to ensure the validity of science in making policies that are claimed to be based on science.

I enclose a copy of my report titled Restoring Scientific Integrity, together with a copy of Dr Alan Moran’s report titled The Hidden Cost of Climate Policies and Renewables.  These show that your government’s destructive energy policies are costly mistakes for which the people of Queensland are paying heavily and for which you have no justifiable scientific basis.

I request that you reconsider your farming, climate and renewable energy policies.  Your Labor government’s reef regulations will destroy east coast farming and your energy policies will smash all industries across the state, destroy livelihoods, export jobs and place a frightful burden on all families and on people’s cost of living.

I look forward to your reply and request that your government holds an independent inquiry into the unfounded “science” underpinning its reef regulations, repeals the legislation and apologies to farmers across the state.

Yours sincerely

Senator Malcolm Roberts

Senator for Queensland

Photo by Daniel Pelaez Duque on Unsplash