For those in Australia’s marine science and conservation community, a dream of having a network of marine parks around the continent has been 20 years in the making.



The story is one of heartbreak, near misses and painful compromise and, in the view of some, a false dichotomy of sacrifice between science and economic and political interests.

Now Australia may be about to reach a historic milestone in marine conservation – just as it was in 2013 – with a set of plans before parliament for a network of 44 marine parks that are at the whim of politicians.

Some, like the Labor party, major conservation groups and many scientists, see the plans as scientifically compromised to the point where they can’t support them.

Others say even though environment minister Josh Frydenberg’s long-awaited plans will not give Australia’s oceans the protection they need, the prospect of more delay and uncertainty is difficult to vote for.

“This is not an ecologically representative marine reserve system – and that is unambiguously true,” says world leading conservation management expert Prof Hugh Possingham of the University of Queensland.

“But I have been waiting for 20 years to do this on the sea. If throwing them out means we have to wait another 20 years ... well, I just think it’s time.”

Labor has moved to block the plans in parliament, but will need the support of some crossbench senators and the Greens who, right now, are undecided.

What’s not in doubt is that over that 20 years, the threats to the oceans have multiplied. Pressures are mounting from acidification, pollution, plastics, overfishing, coastal development, global warming and rising demands for fish from growing global populations.

Quick Guide The political battle over Australia's marine parks Show What are the commonwealth marine parks? The marine parks are a network of reserves covering almost 3.2m square kilometers of water around Australia.

How did they come about? In 1998, under John Howard’s Liberal government, the commonwealth, state and Northern Territory governments agreed to establish marine reserves that were “comprehensive”, “adequate” and “representative”. The goal was to conserve marine ecosystems and protect biodiversity, without significantly damaging commercial or recreational interests. The governments set a target to have the reserves in place by 2012.

After years of planning and consultation, the Gillard Labor government unveiled the plans instituting those protections in June 2012. In November that year the marine parks were officially proclaimed.

The enforcement of the protections in the parks was set out in management plans, also published in 2012. What practical difference did the parks make? Very little, because at the 2013 election the Coalition under Tony Abbott was elected after promising to review the parks, and the management plans were set aside while the review was carried out. The review concluded in September 2016 and recommended different management plans that made huge reductions in the highest level of protection. In July 2017, the Turnbull government announced plans with cuts to protections that went even further. The proposed plans were published in March 2018. What happens now? The management plans are “disallowable,” meaning either house of parliament can block them by a majority vote. Labor has said it will move to do so in both the House of Representatives and the Senate.

But how did Australia get here?

Under prime minister John Howard, Australia agreed to begin building a network of marine reserves in 1998.

Michelle Grady, now head of ocean conservation work at Pew Charitable Trusts in Australia, had already been lobbying hard for about four years at that time. “That was the dawn of a new era for marine conservation – an approach that was scientific and systemic. Nobody thought then, that it would come to this.”

The first set of marine parks were declared in the south-east region around Tasmania, Victoria and South Australia in 2007, but six more years passed before the rules for what could happen inside those parks – the so-called management plans – took effect.

But according to WWF’s head of oceans Richard Leck, another high-watermark for ocean conservation came in 2004. The Howard government drastically increased the “no take” areas of the Great Barrier Reef marine park where fishing would be banned.

“That was a difficult campaign,” says Leck. “When the reef was first declared a World Heritage area, it had about 4.5% as sanctuaries where you couldn’t fish or do any extractive activities. By the end of the campaign, the Howard government declared more than one third of the reef as sanctuary.”

In 2016 when Great Barrier Reef researchers compared “no take” green zones to areas that are open to fishing, they have found universal benefits.

Using 20 years of data, they found corals inside the protected areas were more resilient to disease, bleaching, outbreaks of crown-of-thorns starfish and they recovered quicker from storm damage. Researchers have also found, not surprisingly, that “no take” zones increase the numbers of fish.

But since 2004, Leck says there has been a “trail of missed opportunities” and the country has gone from “global leader to laggard” on marine conservation.

“Today, we have a government that’s not following the leadership of the conservative Howard government of the time. We are ignoring the best available science and the community sentiment.”

Things again looked promising in November 2012 and marine conservation took another leap forward, when Labor environment ministers Peter Garrett and then Tony Burke flagged plans for 44 new marine parks circumnavigating the continent.

Burke told Guardian Australia: “In 2012, everything was in place and the opposition moved to disallow them then, but that failed. But then the Abbott government came in.”

Tony Abbott’s Coalition swept to power in 2013 and stuck to a promise to suspend Labor’s marine management plans – the rules for what can happen on and in the water – and ordered a review.

The management plans were a dramatic departure from their own independent science review. Michelle Grady, head of ocean conservation at Pew Charitable Trusts

Burke insists his government had followed “every process required of the EPBC Act” but “all that meant nothing as far as the Liberals were concerned.”

University of Queensland Prof Bob Beeton, with 40 years researching marine management, chaired Abbott’s scientific review panel that took three times longer than the government had anticipated to finish its work.

Speaking of the new plans, the now retired Beeton says they are imperfect but a starting point: “The bottom line is that at this moment in time, there is no protection of this enormous area. It would be tragic if this politics of vengeance was to rob Australia of a substantial marine parks system and one that’s better than anything that has got to the starting line in the past.

“This sets the process in motion. It would be a tragedy if these new plans were disallowed. I believe it’s the best outcome you can get.”

The conclusion that this is the “best outcome you can get” is clearly highly contentious.

Prof Colin Buxton, a fisheries scientist at the University of Tasmania, was a fellow co-chair of the Abbott government’s review. He believes the new plans are a step in the right direction.

“It’s a negotiated outcome – it’s not an outcome that a group of scientists would have landed with or a group of fishermen would have landed with or a group of conservationists would have landed with. It’s a compromise. It’s a network designed by committee and it’s time to get on with it.”

The review was finished and handed to then environment minister Greg Hunt in December 2015, but it was not until September 2016 that the new minister, Josh Frydenberg, made the review public.

Conservation groups and scientists were critical of the rezoning the review had suggested.

The Ocean Science Council of Australia (OSCA) – a network of leading marine researchers and scientists – said it was a “significant step backwards” from Labor’s plans, and were “inconsistent with the Australian government’s commitment to evidence-based marine management.”

In July 2017, the government released a new set of “draft plans” that shocked many in the marine science and conservation movement.

Many areas once coloured green for “no take” were now yellow – a category known as “habitat protection zone” which allows fishing and other activities, but does not allow any interference with the sea floor.

Marine scientists regard this as only “partial protection” – something akin to insuring only the floorboards of your house while ignoring all the contents, including the roof.

“We were very disappointed – actually, we were shocked,” remembers Michelle Grady.

She says the critics in the scientific community got “louder and louder” as the zoning got “weaker and weaker”.

“The management plans were a dramatic departure from their own independent science review,” she says.

“They were proposing to strip about 50% from the higher-levels of protection across the network – that’s an area that would represent about half of Australia’s national parks on land. It was unexpected, particularly given the wide consultation up to that point.”

Prof David Booth, director of the Centre for Environmental Sustainability at University of Technology Sydney, says when those draft plans were released, they were “another slap in the face for evidence-based science.”

“It was mind blowing. We were very angry,” says Booth.

All up, analysis from a coalition of conservation groups says about 35 million hectares of green zones have been lost from Labor’s original plans to those now before parliament.

Peter Cochrane, another member the Abbott Government commissioned expert scientific review panel, admits that after the draft management plans were released in 2017, there were “some areas of significant difference” from the panel’s recommendations.

Every environmental protection is hostage to a future rogue action from a government. This is the nature of a democracy. Tony Burke, Labor environment spokesman

He said the largest areas of departures from what had been recommended and what was proposed was in the Coral Sea.

“Clearly you don’t have to be Einstein to work out that we were not engaged in a political negotiation in terms of what the stakeholders might have been arguing through the political process.

“My understanding is that [after the review was submitted] the politics came to bear and that produced the result we saw in the draft plans.”

“We thought we had done the best job in terms of the science and the balance of interests. There certainly was a reduction [in areas of higher protection] from what we had recommended and to that extent that departure was inconsistent with what we recommended.”

“This process is hard everywhere in the world because of long-standing economic interests in the ocean,” he says. “Any change is difficult. No other country to my knowledge has attempted such an ambitions and representative approach.”

Prof Jessica Meeuwig, director of the Marine Futures Lab at the University of Western Australia and an OSCA member, agrees the plans presented by the Labor government in 2012 were “marginal”.

But, she says, there was an acceptance among scientists that they were good enough as a starting point from which to push for improvements later.

But after seeing the plans tabled before parliament this week, Meeuwig is far less equivocal. She believes the new plans should be disallowed.

“In 2012 we sort of accepted that while they were marginal, there was room to improve them. These plans are so bad that this is no longer the case. The idea that this is the best we can do is rubbish – in 2012, all the stakeholders were on board.”

Meeuwig argues there is a further risk to accepting the Turnbull government’s plans. Once the plans are in place, she says there will be a major effort from researchers to look at the impact of the “no take” green zones on the biodiversity in those areas.

But because those green zones have been cut and fragmented, there is a danger that scientific reviews could conclude the green zones were ineffective when they were essentially compromised.

Quick Guide Coral in crisis: last chance to act Show What is coral? Coral is made up of layers of skeletons of tiny animals called polyps. Over many years, these colonies form banks that are known as reefs. Only the living surface of the coral is coloured – the layers of dead matter beneath are white. Where are reefs found? Coral reefs are located in tropical oceans. The world’s largest coral reef is the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. The second-largest is off the coast of Belize, in central America. Other reefs are found in Hawaii, the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean. Because they need sunlight to survive, the reefs form in waters that are usually no deeper than 45 metres. Why are they important? They protect coastlines from damaging wave action and tropical storms; provide habitats for thousands of species of marine organisms; and generate essential nutrients for food chains. They are also a critically important source of revenue. It is estimated that the Great Barrier Reef alone supports a tourism market worth more than A$1.5bn (£842m) a year to the Australian economy. Why are the reefs dying? The temperature of our oceans is rising as global warming grips our planet. When the water temperature gets too warm, corals expel the algae that thrive in their tissue and provide them with nutrition. Coral without the algae quickly die of starvation. Tourism is also taking its toll. When boats carrying visitors drop anchor, they smash into reefs and spill oil into once-pristine waters. Hotels also pump sewage on to the reefs, as our report points out. How bad is the threat? Marine biologists estimate that roughly 75% of the world’s coral reefs face danger. Local threats include destructive fishing, uncontrolled coastal development, tourism and pollution. Global threats include climate change and ocean acidification. How many reefs will die out? We have already lost about half of all the world’s coral reefs, most them having disappeared over the past 30 years. Scientists warn that even if we could halt global warming today, more than 90% of the reefs will die by 2050.

Robin McKie, Science Editor Photograph: Auscape/Universal Images Group Editorial

“What we’ll have then, is an argument that green zones don’t work when of course the science shows they do,” she says.

Possingham warns against throwing the baby out with the bathwater. He points out that Australia has signed up to the United Nations Convention on biological diversity, which carried a commitment that marine areas are “conserved through effectively and equitably managed, ecologically representative and well connected systems of protected areas.”

He says in his view neither the current plans, nor Labor’s 2012 plans, were a “representative system”.

“There are many entire ecosystem types with no protection at all” he says, adding there was a tendency to designate areas of higher protection “in areas not under threat” and so they achieved nothing.

“The science is solid on this, but nothing has changed.” He says “no take zones” have been shown to have more support to sustainable fishing than simply protecting the ocean floor. “But we have waited a long time for this system.”

Burke concludes: “Every environmental protection is hostage to a future rogue action from a government. This is the nature of a democracy.”

And this, in many ways, could be the insurance policy Australia’s oceans need as the current plans sit pregnant in parliament.

In reality, a future government could choose to revisit them and it could decide, instead, to “go rogue” on the increasing threats to Australia’s unique and beautiful ocean.