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Peter George moved to Hobart a decade ago, after a distinguished journalism career that included a stint as a Four Corners reporter. He looked at Tasmania’s political convulsions as an interested outsider, and felt himself drawn in.

What struck George about the salmon industry in particular was that “for all the talk about community consultation and social licence, they were not interested in discussion.” So, he helped found NOFF (Neighbours of Fish Farming), and then became the first president of TAMP (Tasmanian Alliance for Marine Protection), a co-ordinating body for a dozen otherwise disparate fishing, community and coastal groups. “We work with Surfrider, Bob Brown Foundation and others with interests in fish farming and the Maugean skate. I’m the hub for all that.”

These days, NOFF has a paid campaigner working on campaigns including the Maugean skate, a bottom-dwelling ray that might have remained unknown to the vast majority of Australians if it wasn’t for its role in the story of Tasmanian salmon. It was unknown to science until as recently as 1988. Between 2012 – when the industry started to expand in Macquarie Harbour and elsewhere – and 2021, the skate’s numbers collapsed by almost half. The skate has been feeding on the floor of Macquarie Harbour since the age of the dinosaurs. Tanya Plibersek has been Federal Environment Minister for just over two years and is likely to preside over its extinction. Such are the wages of political expedience.

The Macquarie Harbour salmon pens pump the equivalent of a million people’s effluent into the estuary every year. That decomposing fish waste sucks oxygen out of the water, leaving an anoxic death zone beneath, where the skates are literally suffocating. The most recent EPA Environmental Status Report on the condition of Macquarie Harbour was eight years ago, in 2017, and back then it found “worryingly low” levels of dissolved oxygen and expressed concern over the viability of the Maugean skate. An EPA Status Report for Dissolved Oxygen in September last year, reported continued reductions in median dissolved oxygen in the Harbour – reductions it pointed out had begun to occur in 2010.

A ‘National Recovery Team,’ established in 2023 has achieved precisely nothing to save the skate, hamstrung by its own terms of reference, which require it not to get in the way of the salmon farmers. So instead, the team focuses on captive breeding, as though the skates have a fertility problem, and not a problem of slow industrial poisoning. Neither state party is interested in the fate of Macquarie Harbour, or its inhabitants. As it was in convict times, the harbour remains a great place to hide a dirty truth. By now, according to Peter George, “they should have been transitioning the west coast for a decade or more.”

Macquarie Harbour produces only 9-10 per cent of the state’s salmon, but George says Petuna would be “in deep shit” if the waterway was closed to farming. It’s much more profitable than other sites because the fish don’t need ‘bathing’ due to the Harbour’s unique intermingling of fresh and salt waters. (‘Bathing’ is a polite euphemism for flushing in separate freshwater to remove parasites; a violent and often fatal procedure of sucking fish up vacuum tubes, passing them through chemically treated water and pumping them out again, often mincing fish as they go through).

Because Petuna has only one operational lease outside of Macquarie Harbour (in the Tamar estuary) they’ve hedged their bets, obtaining lease permission in Storm Bay, the large square bay formed by the Derwent rivermouth, North Bruny Island and the western side of the Tasman Peninsula.

There’s already a lot of farms there. But Petuna want to move into a more northeasterly part of Storm Bay: they’re planning 50 pens near Frederick Henry Bay, a place where there is only 100 red handfish left. These ancient, tiny, brightly coloured bottom-feeding fish are critically endangered, and are known to inhabit only two 50-metre stretches of reef. So, leaving the extinction of the Maugean skate in their wake, there’s every chance Petuna will participate in another extinction. And they’d be doing it six kilometres off Clifton Beach, one of Tasmania’s most popular surf beaches. Even by Salmon Tasmania’s standards, that takes some chutzpah.

Would Petuna sacrifice their Macquarie Harbour operation for a political fix? Peter George agrees it makes sense but thinks not. Luke Martin, the Salmon Tasmania lobbyist, made a pledge in the Hobart Mercury to give no ground to the Maugean skate: “This industry will not concede one single fish or one single job.” And the big companies are standing firm with Petuna.

Since 2018, the TAMP organisations have been united in trying to save the skate. “Until recently the major political parties have all dodged it as an election issue,” says George. This is despite the fact that Tanya Plibersek has the legislative tool at her disposal – the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act – to halt the extinction tomorrow if she chose to.

But political honesty, let alone political action, can be costly, which is why the political class have been reduced to invertebrates. Speaking at the release of the Tasmanian government's Salmon Industry Plan in Hobart in 2023, Jo Palmer, the state minister responsible for aquaculture, admitted the salmon companies had lost their social licence with the public, and said they “are really wanting to participate in having that social licence returned." She lost her job instead.

The lies, the destruction, the brutal politics of salmon farming are now the major environmental story in Tasmania – no small achievement in a state with a litany of epic environmental struggles. “Bigger than Tarkine,” says George. “There’s now a tsunami of interest in the debate.” Federal politicians are trying to outbid each other in support of the industry. Our Prime Minister, head of a government that has promised an end to extinctions, has also promised $28 million in support of the Macquarie Harbour salmon farmers. It’s such a perverse position, so utterly illogical, that a paranoid mind might search for more nefarious motives.

The Murdoch media, ever eager to kick the greenies, have weighed in with a flurry of page-one stories in The Australian. Anchored in the false and disproven jobs claims, all of them chorus support for the industry, and aim to undermine Labor and support Peter Dutton.

But the field is not as clear as the major parties would like to think: Braddon and Bass, both bellwether federal electorates, are in fights, along with Lyons in the south-east. And while the major parties try to outbid one another in sycophancy to their tax-dodging foreign patrons, opportunities open up for independents and minor parties. There’s a federal election looming. The nearly 70 per cent of Tasmanians who are well aware that they’re being had, will be looking for way to punish those sycophants.

Peter George has recently decided to stand as an independent federal election candidate in the seat of Franklin. The sitting member is Julie Collins, the federal Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry. "The Franklin electorate is Ground Zero for the destruction of waterways and the marine environment by the salmon industry,” he explains, “and with it our way of life. Unless politicians are confronted with the possibility of losing their jobs, nothing is going to change. There’s so much anger about this industry, and if we can channel just some of that it into votes, it will help change happen. Julie Collins may be Labor’s most senior federal politician in Tasmania, but I think she’s in for a big shock.”

Captives Going in Circles is a three-part series examining the environmental, social and political effects of the Tasmanian salmon industry. Salmon Tasmania did not respond to a request for comment.