From Pacific the ocean of the future (Simon Winchester, 2015) pp348-50
Meanwhile, other threats appear to be gaining ground. The Marine Park Authority, the government body that since its founding in 1975 regulates and protects the reef (and is funded largely by the fees it charges tourists) quickly points out that climate change does the greatest damage. But it has been widely criticized for allowing developers and, most-especially, mining companies to undertake projects that place the reef in even greater and more immediate peril.
The most classic example of such a development is a proposed huge new coal port to be built at Abbot Point, near the central Queensland town of Bowen; this port will be neighbor to the Whitsunday Islands and Hayman Island and Airlie Beach and Lindeman Island and a host of other of the most lyrically beautiful of the reefs best-known treasures. The argument over the building of this port, and over the millions of tons of seabed that will need to be dredged and dumped to make way for its loading wharves (smothering with dust the clear waters that are so essential for the life of corals and sea grasses), has pitted Australia’s perceived economic needs against the long-term hopes of the much wider world community.
This argument serves as a reminder that Australia possesses a formidable reserve of the minerals needed by the ever-growing economies of East Asia – China, most especially. A large number of Australians have profited hugely from this trade. The country’s economy has largely managed to insulate itself from the world’s recent economic storms, with the Australian people enjoying and preserving an enviable standard of living even while much of the world beyond has been tightening belts and cutting spending. More than a third of Australia’s exports go to China; coal and iron ore account for 70 percent of that total.
Not surprisingly, Canberra is doing all it can to help keep it that way. In 2013 the government’s ministry in charge of the environment approved the plan for the dredging of Abbot Point and the government-run Marine Park Authority then issued the necessary permit. TWO Australian bodies nationally charged with the protection of nature have in this instance found it more expedient to protect coal mining interests — and have come in for widespread condemnation as a result.
One might think that even the most myopic and misinformed would regard mixing coal with coral as self-evidently unwise. The entire country was gripped by a drama in April 2010 when a fully laden Chinese-registered coal carrier, the Shen Neng 1, cut a corner in coming out of a coal staithe in Rockhampton, grounded on the reef, gouged a two-mile-long soar in the reef, and left behind it a two-square-mile oil spill. Fatigue was offered as an excuse. The master and his deck officer were arrested, and they appeared, quite bewildered, in a local court – where they were promptly given bail and allowed to go back to the ship and head on home to China. The reef that was hit by the ship will need at least thirty years to recover, if it ever does. The Marine Park Authority solemnly promised it would issue sterner rules for dealing with such navigation errors. Yet three years later (memories being short when Chinese money is at stake) this same government body gave permission for yet more coal docks to be built nearby.
Charlie Veron, already grieving at what he sees as the reef’s impending ruin, is angry and skeptical. On hearing about the Marine Park Authority’s approval of the Abbot Point dredging scheme, he remarked that the reef’s sole official local guardian and protector was “committing suicide.” In early 2015 the World Wildlife Fund further condemned the government for its indifferent stewardship, for bowing to commercial interests, and for placing the economy and the China trade before the wider needs of the planet.
And ten thousand miles away, in Geneva, officials at UNESCO have been similarly exercised. They have the ability and the right to declare the reef’s World Heritage Site status under threat; and they also have the right, in extremis, to withdraw that status altogether. Australia, needless to say, would be publicly humiliated. But commerce being what it is, and reefs to some being merely pretty, Australia would undoubtedly also continue to sell its coal to China in ever-swelling tonnages. Business, in the new Pacific, is a powerful trump.
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