Col McKenzie calls on government to stop funding work of Terry Hughes, saying tourists ‘won’t do long-haul trips when they think the reef is dead’

This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

A Queensland tourism representative has called one of the Great Barrier Reef’s leading researchers “a dick”, blaming the professor for a downturn in tourism growth at the state’s greatest natural asset.

Col McKenzie, the head of the Association of Marine Park Tourism Operators, a group that represents more than 100 businesses in the Great Barrier Reef, has written to the federal government asking it to stop funding the work of Professor Terry Hughes, claiming his comments were “misleading” and damaging the tourism industry.

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But the Australian Conservation Foundation said tourism representatives and operators like McKenzie should stop blaming scientists for reporting what was happening to the reef and start targeting major polluters to ensure change.

Hughes, who serves as the director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, and is considered one of the world’s leading experts on the reef, has been warning of the damage rising water temperatures have been inflicting on the reef for years.

People won’t do long-haul trips when they think the reef is dead Col McKe, Association of Marine Park Tourism Operators

While not disagreeing there was work to be done on the reef’s health, McKenzie accused Hughes of exaggerating the damage, which he said has been detrimental to the region’s multibillion-dollar tourism industry.

“I think Terry Hughes is a dick,” he told Guardian Australia. “I believe he has done tens of millions of dollars of damage to our reef in our key markets, being America and Europe. You went to those areas in 2017 and they were convinced the reef was dead. And people won’t do long-haul trips when they think the reef is dead.”

McKenzie said in 2016, tourism growth in the region had returned to pre-global financial crisis levels, before “that growth died” in 2017, which he blamed on Hughes “negative comments”.

In April 2016 Hughes made international headlines after releasing his final report on extensive aerial and underwater surveys, which showed that of the surveyed reefs (911 individual reefs), only 7% had escaped coral bleaching.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A scientist measures coral mortality in October 2016 following bleaching on the northern Great Barrier Reef. Photograph: Tane Sinclair-Taylor/AP

McKenzie said that gave the impression the reef was “dead”. “All driven off the back of the negative comments made by a researcher paid entirely by commonwealth funds. I think it is a misuse of commonwealth funds to make false or misleading comments to the media.”

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He has previously written to ministers Christopher Pyne and Greg Hunt over the issue and said he had spoken to Josh Frydenberg “informally”.

A spokeswoman for the Australian Research Council said the council had provided $28m over the past seven years to James Cook University to fund the Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, with the funding going to the centre as a whole, not an individual.

“All projects funded through the ARC are subject to rigorous assessment and only the highest-quality applications are funded,” she said in a statement.

“The ARC monitors all projects that it funds for the achievement of their goals. All projects funded through the ARC are expected to be undertaken in accordance with the Australian code for the responsible conduct of research, which applies to the quality and integrity of the research.”

Hughes did not respond to McKenzie’s comments directly, but included his most recent peer-reviewed articles in Science and Nature, which deal with the increased incidence of coral bleaching as a result of rising sea temperatures.

His Science paper, published on 5 January, found that coral bleaching events were now happening too regularly to allow the reef to adequately recover.

“We analysed bleaching records at 100 globally distributed reef locations from 1980 to 2016,” the paper reported. “The median return time between pairs of severe bleaching events has diminished steadily since 1980 and is now only six years.”

The CEO of the Australian Conservation Foundation, Kelly O’Shanassy, said too much was at stake for tourism operators to blame scientists for what was actually happening to the reef and the real problem, climate change, had to be addressed.

“Blaming scientists and attempting to get their funding cut is the worst possible response to this crisis,” she said. “Scientists are not to blame. Big polluters and their political allies are to blame. We need high-quality science more than ever so we can monitor and track what’s happening to the reef.”

Darrell Wade, the executive chair of Intrepid Travel, also disputed the idea that talking about environmental problems kept tourists away.

“The idea that conservation and tourism could be at odds on this issue is crazy,” Wade said. “It’s been implied that talking about the issues will have a negative impact on business – but we’ve actually found that the opposite is true.”

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The latest health report from the Great Barrier Reef Marine Authority found outbreaks of crown-of-thorn starfish across the reef.

It noted the world heritage site has experienced “multiple significant impacts” over the past two years, including “severe coral bleaching, outbreaks of coral disease and crown-of-thorns starfish, and a severe tropical cyclone and subsequent flood plumes”.

“The significant heat stress experienced during summer 2016-17 – along with a warmer than average winter and spring in 2017 – means corals faced continued stress and will potentially be more susceptible to bleaching and disease in early 2018,” it reported.