Labor asks UNESCO not to declare the Great Barrier Reef ‘in danger’. There’s nothing wrong with it
By Professor Peter Ridd, retired reef physicist, James Cook University
Next month, UNESCO will decide whether the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) will be officially declared “in danger”.
To placate the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) our Federal and State governments have promised to do more around greenhouse emissions and to further restrict our farming industries. Incredibly, they’ve even stopped gill net fishing in the southern Gulf of Carpentaria – to save the Reef which is nowhere near the Gulf!
This charade is a duplicitous, theatrical, extortion racket.
Duplicitous because the Federal Government usually argues that the Reef is endangered for its own political reasons, but now is asking UNESCO to declare the opposite. Labor usually needs the Reef to be ‘endangered’ to support justification of its controversial Net Zero policies which drive up the cost of everything.
But now, the Albanese government is arguing the very opposite to avert bad media publicity that will further scare tourists away from the Reef.
Extortion racket because UNESCO threatens us every few years with this bad publicity, unless we comply with its demands.
Reef’s reputation in tatters
But the damage has been done. The Reef’s reputation is in tatters. The world has been told a million times over past decades that the GBR is on its last legs. As a result, unsurprisingly, tourist numbers to the GBR are down by 20% since 2016 and are about the same today as they were two decades ago. In the same period the number of visitors to Australia as a whole have almost doubled.
So Australia has probably lost half a million Reef tourists each year, worth over $1 billion to the economy, due to the scaremongering. The constant stories wrongly stating the Reef is in trouble mean that everybody in the world is being told the Reef has lost half its coral, or worse. Again and again … and again.
Theatrical because the current Labor Federal, and previous Queensland Labor government, pretend to argue against the UNESCO endangerment listing but have ‘forgotten’ to use the best argument – namely that the GBR has registered more coral in each of the past five years than in any of the previous 35 years. Plus, the species of coral that have increased are the types most susceptible to hot-water bleaching. Recent “devastating” bleaching events obviously had little effect and all of the GBR’s 3000 individual reefs still have excellent coral.
Why does the Federal Government not use this irrefutable evidence to argue that the Reef is fine? Not endangered at all.
Simply because that evidence could come back to bite them when they next want to impose even more regulations on Queensland farmers.
In any event, UNESCO is unlikely to declare the Reef in danger next month. They would lose leverage. An extortionist cannot afford to kill the hostage if it wants to keep getting its payoffs.
The current LNP Queensland Government has good form in telling UNESCO to stop politicking here. Premier David Crisafulli recently told the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture who criticised this state’s ‘adult-time for adult-crime’ laws that “Queenslanders, not UN boffins” will decide what happens here.
That’s how you do it!
While he’s at it, Mr Crisafulli might want to support the campaign asking for checking of the doom-science being produced by our Reef-science institutions. These institutions, which receive hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars every year, have a vested interest in the Reef being perceived as dying – and in conniving with UNESCO. Their jobs depend on the GBR being in a constant state of near-death no matter what the data shows.
But this doom science is smashing the Queensland economy by strangling our tourism industry and driving our hard-working – and economically critical – primary producers in the fishing, farming and forestry industries to the wall as they drown in unwarranted layers of red and green tape.
The hostage, the Great Barrier Reef, must be finally freed so that it can once again be truly recognised as one of the Seven Natural Wonders of the World – vibrant, healthy and here for the long haul.
Peter Ridd
Chairman, Australian Environment Foundation