Senators accused of ‘ignorance’ and ‘cherry-picking’ over science of water management
Clashes between Australian senators and leading research scientists at a Senate inquiry into water management and the Great Barrier Reef have culminated in a split report.
The Senate inquiry, held earlier this year, examined quality assurance processes around farm water runoff and how it affected the reef. Declining water quality due to farming has been blamed for difficulty in reef recovery from bleaching events.
But the hearings highlighted major differences in points of view, with researchers hotly defending their work and one leading scientist accusing a senator of “ignorance” of science.
A report released on 8 October by the Senate Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport References Committee recommends further research into the effects of farming runoff on the reef. It says a “water quality forum” should be set up to include the Australian and Queensland governments, reef science research bodies, agriculturalists and natural resource management bodies. It concludes that farming is having a negative impact on the reef.
But a dissenting report from coalition senators said that “the scientific community are not communicating with primary producers in relation to on‑farm activities. There has been no opportunity for producers to communicate their observations to the science community.” The dissenting report noted evidence that only 3.3 per cent of the reef was affected by runoff.
The coalition’s dissenting report said there was considerable uncertainty about factors affecting the reef, causing governments to focus on “the variables that can be influenced”, but “the lack of scientific certainty should not be disproportionately borne by farmers”.
In notes to the Senate committee report, the Australian Greens said they had “opposed this inquiry from the outset on the grounds that it was an unwarranted attack on the science and the scientists” working on water quality.
Labor senator Kim Carr told the inquiry that the amount spent on water-related research in Australia had dropped from A$85 million to about A$15m between 2009 and 2017.
Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, deputy director of the Australian Research Council’s Centre for Excellence in Coral Reef Studies, accused One Nation senator Malcolm Roberts of “cherry-picking” information during the hearings in an attempt to discredit reef research.
Hoegh-Guldberg said “this type of bias illustrates a profound ignorance of the scientific process, as well as a worrying disregard for Senate inquiries that should be solely directed at the objective search for evidence and truth”.
The effects of carbon dioxide levels and acidification of sea water on the behaviour of fish were disputed at the hearings. Roberts quoted research that he said “100 per cent” proved the position of researchers at James Cook University to be wrong.