Legislative Council, Tuesday 24 March 2026
Ms FORREST (Murchison) – Thanks, Mr President. I’d like to support the motion from the member for Hobart, and I will traverse over some of the information she’s already provided because I think I’m going to keep it in context and relevant, but it is also to raise my concern about the scale and the lack of transparency around antibiotic use in Tasmania’s salmon agriculture industry. Just to be really clear: I’m not opposed to salmon farming. Aquaculture is a legitimate and potentially valuable industry for Tasmania, and I accept that a well-managed sustainable salmon or aquaculture sector can have a future here; but the word sustainable carries real meaning in this context, particularly right now, as the evidence would suggest that we are moving further and further away from that standard.
I believe a sustainable industry relies on improving animal health outcomes through: better site selection; lower stocking densities; and fish farm management practices designed to reduce the need for interventions like antibiotics in the first place. These are critical considerations. The question this motion puts squarely before us is whether the current trajectory of intensive stocking, mass antibiotic use, and opaque reporting is consistent with those principles; and, on the evidence, it’s not.
Arguments that this sector is one of the most highly regulated and scrutinised industries in the state – and you will probably hear this from the Leader when she gets up to reply on behalf of the government – hold little weight or credibility if we cannot see what is going on, and information relevant to the health and wellbeing of our native fisheries and human health is not revealed proactively, or on an evidence based footing at all times. The evidence that emerged through budget Estimates was deeply troubling, and the member for Hobart has referred to some of these figures. It is now apparent that more than 815 – or 915, did you say, member for Hobart?
Ms O’Connor – 815 as at 9 January this year.
Ms FORREST – There’s been more since, almost certainly. There was more than 815 kilograms of florfenicol, a broad-spectrum antibiotic that received emergency federal approval for use in Tasmania fairly recently, that was used by salmon companies in south east Tasmanian waters in the space of just three weeks. That’s a lot of antibiotics, as the member for Hobart rightly alluded to, to be put into the waterways in a short period of time.
To be clear about what broad spectrum antibiotics are: they’re not specific. They’re broad to kill most things that don’t look nice. As people – humans would know when you go to your doctor, if they can identify the actual bacteria, assume it is a bacteria and not a virus that’s making you unwell, they will try and specifically prescribe an antibiotic for that bacteria. If they don’t know what it is, or they haven’t got time to figure out exactly what it is because the nature of the illness is such that requires immediate treatment, they will use a broad spectrum antibiotic.
What that does is kill not just the target bacteria, but all your good bacteria in your gut, or lots of it, maybe not all of it, and any other bacteria that may not be making you sick. That’s what they do, and let’s be clear about that. They’re not targeted, narrow spectrum drugs that target a specific bacterium; they attack and kill a broad range of bacteria, some of them which are very good for you. Not all bacteria are bad.
I know the member for Hobart went through this, but I intend to go through it again, and I think we should place on the record the precise circumstances of the approval that was granted. In November 2025, the Australian Pesticides and Veteran Medicine Authority, the APVMA, granted an emergency permit for the use of florfenicol in salmon in Tasmania. As the member Hobart said, this was the first time florfenicol had been authorised for aquaculture in Australia. Now, I remember I was at that briefing – it was quite the debacle, I must say, but in any event, it was pretty clear that the industry and the government, as they should be, were very concerned that we were seeing incidents of the bacteria Piscirickettsia salmonis, which I will just say as P. salmonis now, so we don’t have to trip over it every time we say it, was actually occurring in an endemic situation in our waterways, but there was genuine concern about another mass mortality.
This was before the summer really started, when rising temperatures in our water, which happens over summer because it’s summer, increase the risk substantially. There was suggestion that it was going to be an early summer, water temperatures would rise more quickly and so there was this desperate rush – and I call it a desperate rush – to approve, as the member for Hobart said, a novel antibiotic that hadn’t been used in Tasmania for the aquaculture industry ever – in Australia, not just in Tasmania.
The permit was granted. Well, we didn’t know whether there was an outbreak or not. That was unclear at the briefing. It was just shemozzle as to what was actually going on.
It became apparent if there wasn’t an outbreak, there was definitely concern that there was a Piscirickettsia salmonis outbreak or likely outbreak any day soon. But there was also concern that it perhaps had already killed up to 150 metric tonnes of salmon earlier in 2025.
Clearly it was already a problem. We were looking down the barrel in early summer, the temperatures rising in summer and the perfect situation or perfect storm for another mass, casualty event.
Of course we don’t want to see that. From an animal welfare point of view, we don’t want to see that. From a public awareness and seeing dead fish wash up on your beach perspective, we don’t want to see that. The industry also doesn’t actually want to see that because that’s their profit disappearing.
So, the permit was granted. But members should understand what the permit actually authorised. It was not simply a licence to address an immediate crisis. If indeed there was an immediate crisis, that was never actually clear. It enabled the potential deployment of between 5600 and 11,200 kilograms of florfenicol through to August 2026.
To go to the member for Hobart’s point, we don’t know how much of that, up to 11,200 kilograms of the florfenicol has been tipped into our waters, and that’s the problem. It is one of the problems.
In other words, the 815 kilograms revealed at Estimates up until and also the information since received up until January was not the ceiling. It wasn’t the total amount that could be put in. It was actually just the beginning.
There is a further dimension to this that warrants the serious attention of all members. Documents obtained through right to information and to name those up if you want to go looking for them, RTI013-2025 26 and RTI 007 2025 26, available on the NRE Tasmania disclosure log reveal that Tasmanian salmon industry representatives had been advised as early as February 2025 that’s over a year ago and months before the formal emergency application that florfenicol could potentially be used under veterinary prescription without full APVMA approval. As the member for Hobart said, off licence, when it can be used for pigs under a veterinary prescription and prepared by vet.
A government official confirmed in writing to Salmon Tasmania that their understanding was correct that florfenicol could be used off label under a veterinary prescription. No environmental assessment was required. No public consultation was required. No federal oversight. The emergency framing that followed months later deserved scrutiny in that context. There was all this work going on behind the scenes to lead to a different outcome. They wanted to have it permanently listed effectively.
That moves me on then to the industry’s long-term ambition in this space, which was confirmed in Senate Committee hearings recently. I want to draw attention to the evidence given at the federal Senate level because it goes to the heart of what this permit was really all about. Just six weeks ago the Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport Legislation Committee on 10 February 2026, and just weeks before the so-called emergency permit was suspended by the APVMA, the APVMA chief executive Scott Hansen gave evidence that I believe is relevant. This is on Hansard on page 125; the following exchange took place.
Mr Hansen was asked whether florfenicol was designed to replace oxytetracycline as the product the salmon industry would use. For members’ benefit, oxytetracycline is a different family of antibiotics – still broad and still with its own challenges. It would become apparent, particularly at the briefing we had with the minister when we first started raising awareness of it, that it was no longer effective for Piscirickettsia salmonis. That’s why they were seeking another option.
Mr Hansen, in his evidence to the Senate committee, confirmed:
Yes.
He went on further, and in his words in the Hansard:
My understanding is that florfenicol is what the salmon industry is wanting. In the first instance, an application for an emergency permit was put in to try to deal with the immediate issue, but we’ve been told that their long-term ambition is registration of the product and they are collecting data as part of these permits to be able to support that application. [tbc]
To be clear about what he was saying there, he was saying that the emergency permit, the one used to justify the mass deployment of a never before used antibiotic in our waters, was, by the APVMAs own CEO’s account, partly a data collection exercise in pursuit of permanent registration. The permit was a bit of a Trojan horse, you might say, to suggest that this emergency was the doorway to permanent registration, because full registration was always the desired destination.
Mr Hansen also confirmed that the formal applicant for the permit was not the salmon industry companies themselves, but Abbey Laboratories Pty Ltd, as the member for Hobart alluded to. A structural remove between the industry and the regulatory record that is worth noting. Mr Hansen adds something else. He flagged that full registration would require significantly more information, including about antimicrobial resistance. He made the following observations about why permits, rather than registration, are an appropriate mechanism, ‘Once a product is registered, the process for removing that registration is quite cumbersome’. This was the aim of the industry, according to the evidence I was able to look through in various transcripts. If you can get it registered, then it’s much, much harder for that registration to be removed unless you don’t have access to the antibiotic, to florfenicol. In other words, the APVMAs own CEO was signalling at Senate Estimates on the record that permanent registration of florfenicol would make it substantially harder for regulators to act quickly if problems emerged. The APVMA did act quickly when they decided to act. As we’ve seen, problems did emerge and the regulator did need to act quickly. And they did.
If we’re in a full registration situation, they wouldn’t have been able to act that quickly. It’s really important to understand this and what the end game really is here. In the same hearing, Mr Hansen also confirmed something directly relevant to the transparency failures that this motion identifies. He was asked whether the APVMA had any active monitoring role. He was explicit in this, he said:
The APVMA has not been doing the testing. All monitoring sits with the Tasmanian EPA under the permit conditions. The federal body that issued the permit has, in effect, stood back and observed. [tbc]
Thank goodness for the EPA doing their work. And they did. It’s my understanding – when we were at the briefing, the EPA were asked a range of questions about this, was that they would monitor the surrounding waters within five kilometres to see if there was any rogue if you like – antibiotics in the waters within five kilometres of the pens. They obviously went further and they went to 10 kilometres, which is good and important. It’s particularly important when you realise, they found residues of florfenicol there. That was enough for the APVMA to act based on the work our own environmental regulator, the Environment Protection Authority, provided.
To return to the amount of florfenicol use in Tasmanian waters, these are not insignificant numbers: 815 kilograms of an antibiotic in three weeks in shared waters, waters that are used by recreational swimmers, recreational fishers and commercial fishers whose livelihoods depend on the health of the marine environment. The reality, that should concern every Tasmanian, is that we only know this because of parliamentary scrutiny. It hasn’t been volunteered –
Ms O’Connor – Exactly.
Ms FORREST – and it was not published. People didn’t even have the option of making the choice of whether they went into and used those waters. It was extracted through committee processes, the very accountability mechanism that this Council exists to exercise.
Ms O’Connor – And right to information.
Ms FORREST – Yes there was right to information too. Much of it was redacted. I’m sure the member for Hobart would have seen that.
Ms O’Connor – Yes.
Ms Forrest – That alone should give us pause about what else we need to know particularly under the redactions. What else do we need to know about this?
There was no proactive release of this information. We do not know how many mortalities have occurred in any of the farms where these occur below the mass mortality reporting thresholds. I’d like to know – just out of interest – how many dead fish have been removed in the last 12 months from Macquarie Harbour where it hasn’t been used?
Ms O’Connor – How do we know?
Ms FORREST – We don’t. Unless it reaches a mass mortality level we don’t know. But I understand from my local intelligence, that there is a lot; it’s just not in one go above the reporting level. Because this occurs outside the ready view of Tasmanians – this is the industry itself – it should be proactively reported, deaths and mortalities, as well as antibiotic use.
I know that when I’ve spoken about the mining sector in this place before, you might think what’s the relevance? There is relevance because we know how dangerous a construction site is. Construction sites are the most dangerous places for workers to work. Mines aren’t. They’re one of the safest places, but when a death occurs on a mine site, it’s on the front page of the papers for months. That’s not because those people are more important than a worker that dies on a construction site, or are seriously harmed on a construction site.
My theory for this – and it’s only a theory – is that because it’s underground out of the way in the dark and no one else can see it except those people who are there, it’s easier to hide it. People can’t see it, so they imagine it must be far worse. But in this case, you can’t see it and it actually is much worse because we’re just not seeing the information that would enable us to make informed decisions and choices.
The consequences around the use of florfenicol are not just theoretical. Public health advice had already been issued to swimmers and recreational fishers around the ongoing use of florfenicol in the south west waters. I remember the briefing, there was a reluctance to say whether it was safe or not for humans to consume and how much they could consume of a native fish that had been caught in the vicinity, for children or older people, or people with poor liver function or whatever. The reality is, we just don’t really know.
The rock lobster fishery, a fishery of enormous economic and cultural significance, was temporarily closed as a direct result. That’s a pretty serious outcome and these are not minor inconveniences. For rock lobster fishers, a closure is a loss of income, lost seasons compounding uncertainty about the future of their operations in waters they have fished for generations. That’s for the recreational fishers alone, not talking about the commercial rock lobster fishers. Also, for recreational users, it’s a loss of confidence in the safety of the waters they rightly regard as the public good.
I think we all appreciate the high value of the rock lobster exports into the Asian market, particularly from here, a market that has zero tolerance for antibiotic residues. This is not an abstract environmental concern. They just say zero, that’s it. Any sign of it, that’s it. You could lose your market. We can’t afford to lose this market. We need to look after the fishery, absolutely. It’s a really critically important market for this state.
It is a direct and immediate trade risk for a commercially significant Tasmanian industry. We should be informed about what’s going on. That sector should be informed about what’s going on.
The scale of environmental spread, when eventually tested, proved far wider than the initial assurances suggested. Testing by the Institute of Marine and Antarctic Studies found florfenicol present in Standaway Bay, 10.6 kilometres from the nearest treated salmon pen. Of 840 samples taken from wild fisheries, including rock lobster, abalone, sea urchins, mussel and periwinkles, 165 tested positive. A further 209 were still waiting analysis since results were made public.
The antibiotic was detected in multiple species, at differences that no one predicted, and that the original 3 kilometre public health advisory plainly did not anticipate. We should be very concerned about this.
We did see the federal government intervene on this. The members should be clear about what the intervention confirmed. On 20 February 2026, the APVMA notified the permit holder, it proposed to suspend the permit based on new information about florfenicol detections in non-target species. The permit holder was given until 2 March 2026 to provide evidence that would address the regulator’s concerns. As I understand it, that evidence was not forthcoming to the APVMA’s satisfaction, and thus the suspension of the permit took effect on the 4 March 2026. This was on the grounds of, and I quote from the APVMA directly,
Unacceptable risk of residue exposure to non-target species.
Florfenicol can no longer be used under the provisions of that permit at this current time.
To clarify the question I had when this motion came before us: is the Okehampton Bay application by Tassal to use florfenicol in the rich recreational fishing borders of the Mercury Passage currently moot? Is that the case? The permit under which it would have proceeded has been suspended, so one assumes it is. Yet the application itself tells us something important, even as consequences in south east where waters are mounting. The industry was moving to expand florfenicol use to an entirely new region.
The Mercury Passage was genuinely at risk. It was only the federal government’s intervention, not just action by our own state government, that has stayed this outcome for now. I note too, that the days before the suspension took effect, as I understand from information I’ve seen, Tassal commenced florfenicol treatment in five of its leases on a single day. This was described as unprecedented. The rush to administer the antibiotics – how much has been put in we do not know – before the ban took effect is not the conduct of an industry confident in the science supporting its use.
The suspension vindicates the concerns this motion raises. The APVMA’s own senate estimates evidence, given just weeks before the suspension, showed the regulator was already flagging the need for substantially more data on antimicrobial resistance before any permanent approval could be considered. The suspension confirmed those concerns were well founded.
I know the member for Hobart spoke about the implications of antibiotic resistance. I remember 20 years ago, working as a nurse, the genuine concerns that our intensivists in intensive care units and in those areas where you get critically ill patients, where being in hospital is the worst place you can be for picking up infections. There was a real concern about antibiotic resistance, and that continues. We’re forever chasing more powerful antibiotics which keep getting more toxic, with more side effects. This has happened over many years, through the misuse of antibiotics in human health. Not as common anymore, but patients used to go to the GP expecting to leave with something they need, and if not given a script for antibiotics when they have a cold, they think they’re not being treated properly. Thankfully our GPs are much more robust in saying ‘It’s not something we can treat with antibiotics’. However, there was a period in time when almost anyone who turned up with any sort of upper respiratory issue, that may be an infection, antibiotics were dispensed. That has progressed the antimicrobial resistance.
We should focus on the science. The motion correctly notes that there is limited available science to support intensive, widespread use of florfenicol, and limited understanding of its residual properties and impacts on marine ecology. This is not a fringe issue. It’s not a Greens issue, with all due respect to our Greens member. It’s a matter that affects all of us. It reflects the state of the evidence: the APVMA suspension of the permit on the grounds of unacceptable risks to non-target species; their regulatory finding that confirms exactly this. It’s about our whole marine environment, not just the aquaculture industry, but it’s the aquaculture industry which is adding to this challenge with the use of antibiotics.
What we do know about antimicrobial resistance is serious and well established, as I mentioned. Antibiotic resistance is one of the most significant global public health threats of our time, and I can’t say that strongly enough; because if we lose the capacity to treat patients effectively with effective antibiotics, people will die who wouldn’t have otherwise. Children will die from infections because we can’t find an antibiotic that actually responds to that bacteria they’ve got. That’s how it used to be, back in the day, when people had big families because they expected to lose children. Our life expectancy was much less because we often died of infections that we now think are just something we can deal with.
The World Health Organisation, the Australian Government and the scientific community are in consensus: the misuse and overuse of antibiotics in humans and animals is the primary driver of antimicrobial resistance. The development of resistance to last resort antibiotics is not a distant risk. Last resort antibiotics are the really high-powered ones that have very significant side effects. You have to be in an intensive care unit often and have them IV, being fully monitored, because they’re not very pleasant. It’s now occurring and the consequences for human health will be profound and irreversible.
The long term use of antibiotics as a routine management tool in industrial fish farms is not consistent with the science on antimicrobial resistance, or the principles of sustainable marine husbandry. A genuinely sustainable salmon industry or aquaculture industry does not rely on mass antibiotic use to compensate for stocking densities or farm conditions that make disease outbreaks likely in the first place.
When you think back to the days of the plague, they didn’t know what was spreading the plague to start with. They weren’t aware of the need to isolate, separate themselves from people with it, and they’d just throw their dead bodies out in the street, so the person would come along and collect them on the cart: ‘Bring out your dead.’ We know that crowded conditions with infectious diseases makes them more likely to thrive. It’s pretty simple.
The way we’re operating here is not sustainability, it’s a dependence on growth that grows more dangerous over time. I go back to my point in the beginning: I believe this can be a sustainable industry if only we act in a different way. I want to be clear about the alternatives I’m advocating for, because I support the motion. I do not think the choice is simply between the industry as it is and no industry at all, though some people prefer no industry at all. I accept that, but that’s not my view.
A sustainable salmon industry in Tasmania is achievable, in my view. It requires stocking densities that reflect the carrying capacity of the receiving environment, and that will differ from place to place and differ from time to time: time of the year, the trajectory of climate change, all of those things; but it does require serious investment in site selection and breeding programs that produce fish that have greater disease resistance and reduce the need for antibiotic intervention.
The question of vaccination: yes, the little fish, little fries are vaccinated when they’re little before they go out into the big water. I understand it from the briefing we had when this matter first really started to emerge, that vaccination only lasts about six months and the fish are in the water for up to two years in the big water. So that’s work that needs to be done. Vaccination is a far better mechanism, as a preventative mechanism for all manner of disease, than just treating with more and more and more antibiotics of greater and greater strength or broader spectrum.
Sustainable industry requires farm placement decisions that do not compromise shared use fisheries and recreational waterways, and it requires a regulatory framework with genuine teeth, and one that sets enforceable standards, rather than simply reporting outcomes after the fact. We have seen some good work by the EPA because they monitored beyond the target area and I congratulate them for that, but we need to see much more proactive release of information so that it would help all of us, but also the EPA, one would imagine.
What I’m suggesting here are not radical propositions. They are, in my view, baseline conditions for an industry that can co exist with Tasmania’s other marine industries, its public health obligations and its environmental values over the long term. The current trajectory of growing volumes of antibiotic use, limited science around the impacts, opaque reporting, and impacts on public health and shared fisheries is not that. That’s not where we are.
So this motion is a call for a publicly accessible portal providing real time information on where, when and in what quantities antibiotics are being used on fish in Tasmanian fish farms. In my view, that’s the minimum that Tasmanians who share these waterways are entitled to expect. The fact that 815 kilograms of florfenicol could be deployed in three weeks without the public knowing is not a regulatory oversight; it’s a structural failure of transparency.
I note that even when this permit was suspended, the situation did not meaningfully improve. Attempts to obtain updated figures on total florfenicol use through parliamentary questions, departmental briefings and RTI requests throughout the permit period often came up against barriers of commercial in confidence and other matters. This is not something that should come down to commercial interests when the health and safety of our environment, our people, and our other industries are at risk.
The government’s answer, ultimately, was that the EPA does not hold current aggregate usage figures. Why not? The data would only be made available through final monitoring reports published progressively on the EPA website. Well, it’s a bit late then, and that’s not good enough. Recreational fishers, swimmers, commercial fishers and coastal communities deserve to be able to make informed decisions in real time, to enable them to make their own decisions about their own personal activities in those waterways, not to find out months later through parliamentary hearings or some other mechanism – or not at all, perhaps – because the industry claims commercial confidentiality over the information with direct public health implications. That’s not good enough.
I do support this element of the motion. The technology exists for a portal that can have time of use reporting and I call on the government to act. The technology to deliver such information exists and the public interest case for this is overwhelming. What is lacking, it seems, is the political will to require it of the industry that frankly has operated too long without adequate accountability.
In concluding and supporting this motion, I do not do it as an attack on the salmon industry, but as a statement of what responsible, evidence based regulation looks like, as well as a responsible, evidence based industry looks like, and how far short of the standard we are currently falling. This industry is a significant employer in regional Tasmania and can, and in my view should, operate in a transparent, sustainable and environmentally safe way.
Tasmania’s marine environment is a public asset. Its health is a precondition for tourism, recreation, commercial fishing and the long term viability of aquaculture itself; otherwise they will shoot themselves in the foot. We cannot afford to manage it on a basis of incomplete information, inadequate science and a transparency framework that does not enable the timely extraction of basic and important facts. So, I call on the government, along with the member for Hobart’s call, to respond to the evidence before us with urgency, to require greater transparency, to impose precautionary limits on antibiotic use pending proper scientific review, and to work with the industry towards a genuinely sustainable model that does not depend on mass antibiotic deployment to function. If that’s how we operated our health system, we would be going backwards.
In my view, the salmon industry can be done well. Whether it is being done well right now is a question the evidence does not allow us to answer with any confidence. In fact, I think the evidence is to the contrary. The federal regulator has now confirmed that what this motion argues –
The sitting was suspended from 4.00 p.m. to 4.30 p.m.
Ms FORREST (Murchison) – Thank you, Mr President. I had almost completed my contribution. I just wanted to finish off what I was saying about some of the challenges as I see it.
The federal regulator has now confirmed what this motion argues. The risk is real science was insufficient and the consequences for marine environment were not contained. The APVMA’s CEO told the senate committee that the emergency permit was being used to build a case for permanent registration and the permanent registration will make it harder, not easier, for regulators to act if things go wrong.
The evidence from the federal regulator should be at a starting point for a serious conversation about where the industry goes from here.
Our natural assets and natural environment should be transparently managed through an evidence-based approach. Community trust and trust in government and the industry rely on such an approach.
A lack of public trust means industry in whatever sector will not have a social licence.
This can be done, and it must be done, and it must be done better. I support the motion and expect the government to act.