STATEMENTS BY SENATORS

Senator BLEYER (Tasmania) (13:36): I've spent my life fighting against the logging of our native forests, but there is another, equally destructive activity occurring in our oceans. Fifty-nine licence holders have been granted access to nearly two-thirds of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, where they drag 190 tonnes of coral to shore every year. You can say that coral reefs are the native forests of the ocean.

Like native-forest logging, removal of coral is called 'harvesting', but, instead of blades and diggers, these harvesters use hammers and chisels to rip corals from our reef. Remember, corals are living creatures. Like in wood-chipping our native forests for exports, about 85 per cent of these corals are sold overseas.

The corals that remain on the Great Barrier Reef are resilient. They have had to be. They've survived bleaching, cyclones and floods and persistent agricultural pollution.

It is nonsensical to allow our wild, resilient corals to be shipped off to stock aquariums overseas when at the same time this Labor government is reaching into the taxpayer's pocket to spend $200 million on tank-grown, heat-tolerant corals to replace the ones that are lost to mass bleaching events. Much like timber plantations can transition us away from native-forest logging, onshore aquaculture can do the same for coral being sold for aquariums.

These precious places belong to us all, and the responsibility for protecting the place that is the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park belongs to this federal Labor government. It needs to protect it and stop plundering this precious place for the profits of a few.