Fish-farm regulation and the environment

On a still morning in February 2023, walkers on Nine Mile Beach near Triabunna found the tideline crusted with dead salmon — hundreds of fish, some intact, others reduced to skin and fat by weeks in the water, the smell reaching the caravan park before the fish did. The carcasses had drifted from finfish leases in nearby Okehampton Bay, where a summer heatwave and a disease outbreak had killed stock faster than the farm could remove it, in breach of the daily mortality-collection conditions written into its own environmental licence. It was not the first time Tasmania's salmon industry had put dead fish on a public beach, and the regulator that answered for it, EPA Tasmania, was the same body a state parliamentary inquiry would spend that year being told was too close to the industry to be trusted to stop it happening again.

Tasmania farms more Atlantic salmon than anywhere else in Australia, across three companies — Tassal, Huon Aquaculture and Petuna — operating leases from the sheltered D'Entrecasteaux Channel and Huon Estuary in the state's south to the open, higher-energy water of Storm Bay, the industry's newest and largest frontier. The endangered Maugean skate of Macquarie Harbour, the species most associated with salmon farming's environmental cost, is a single-harbour, single-species crisis covered elsewhere on this site. This piece asks the broader question: does the state's regulatory system — the EPA that licenses these farms, the nutrient caps that limit what they can put in the water, and the planning process that decided where they could expand next — actually protect Tasmania's waterways, or does it mostly manage the industry's reputation after something has already gone wrong.

What the government did

EPA Tasmania has been the state's dedicated environmental regulator for marine finfish farming since 2016, taking over a function previously split between the department responsible for growing the industry and the department responsible for policing it — a structural conflict the change was explicitly meant to fix. The following year, the state government released its Sustainable Industry Growth Plan for the Salmon Industry (2017), which set the policy direction that has shaped the industry since: rather than keep intensifying farming in enclosed, slow-flushing estuaries, new growth would move into open, high-energy coastal water, where stronger currents were expected to disperse fish waste and nutrients more effectively than the sheltered harbours the industry had outgrown.

Storm Bay, the broad, exposed water body between the Tasman Peninsula and Bruny Island, became the plan's flagship site. The Marine Farming Planning Review Panel — the statutory body that assesses amendments to marine farming development plans under the Marine Farming Planning Act 1995 — ran a public assessment of a Storm Bay development plan amendment that added one of the largest single blocks of new marine-farming lease area in the industry's history, finalised in 2020–21 (approx.), with Tassal, Huon Aquaculture and Petuna all subsequently establishing pens there. On paper, the move answered years of criticism that Macquarie Harbour and the Huon Estuary had been stocked past what their water could safely absorb: Storm Bay's water is deeper, colder and better flushed than either.

Alongside the site shift, EPA Tasmania began rebuilding the nutrient-control regime itself. The old system relied on standing caps on the tonnes of fish a lease could hold, a limit companies could work around by timing harvests. From 2022 the EPA began replacing those caps, zone by zone, with Total Permissible Dissolved Nitrogen Output (TPDNO) determinations that measure the nutrient a lease is actually putting into the water rather than the fish sitting in it — starting with Macquarie Harbour in September 2022 and extending the same nitrogen-based approach to the state's other finfish zones, including Storm Bay, the Huon Estuary and the D'Entrecasteaux Channel, through 2022–24 (approx.) (EPA Tasmania, finfish farming determinations, 2022–24). The EPA also runs a Broadscale Environmental Monitoring Program, requiring companies to survey the seafloor beneath and around their leases and report the results, and assigns each lease a compliance class from 1 (best) to 4 based on that monitoring.

The evidence

The clearest test of whether that new system works is what happens when something goes wrong, and the Okehampton Bay event supplies it. Fish farms are required to remove dead stock daily so carcasses do not accumulate or drift; when the February 2023 mortality event overwhelmed that capacity, decomposing fish washed up along the East Coast for weeks, drawing complaints about smell, appearance and public health risk from residents and holidaymakers well beyond the lease boundary (as widely reported at the time; EPA Tasmania compliance record, 2023). EPA Tasmania opened a compliance investigation into mortality-management practices at the site — but the event was not an isolated failure. Mass-mortality events tied to summer heat and disease, including outbreaks of Pilchard orthomyxovirus, first identified in Tasmanian salmon in 2018, have recurred across multiple companies' leases in the years since, a pattern the industry's own biosecurity reporting acknowledges rather than disputes.

That same year, the Legislative Council's Government Administration Committee B opened an inquiry into fin-fish farming in Tasmania, taking evidence from residents, scientists, the industry and the regulator itself. Its report, tabled in November 2023, made 33 recommendations (approx.) — and its most consequential finding was structural, not scientific: that EPA Tasmania, despite the 2016 reform, was still not sufficiently independent of the department that also promotes the industry it regulates, that monitoring data was not published in a form the public could readily scrutinise, and that the enforcement tools available to the regulator were rarely used to their full extent. The committee recommended a genuinely independent EPA — one that did not rely on the same department for funding, staff and policy direction as the industry it polices — alongside mandatory, faster public reporting of mortality events (Legislative Council of Tasmania, Government Administration Committee B, Fin Fish Farming in Tasmania, Nov-2023).

A regulator can move an industry to better water. It cannot move the question of who it answers to.

The critique

The Storm Bay strategy answers a real problem with a defensible idea, but the record since suggests the government treated relocation as a substitute for enforcement rather than a complement to it. Moving expansion into higher-energy water reduces the risk of the kind of slow nutrient build-up that degraded Macquarie Harbour over a decade; it does not touch the separate risk the Okehampton Bay event exposed, which was operational and regulatory rather than oceanographic — a company failing to remove dead stock fast enough, and a regulator whose response was an investigation after the carcasses had already reached a public beach, not a system that caught the mortality event early enough to prevent it. Better water dilutes nutrients. It does not by itself compel faster mortality reporting, tougher licence conditions, or penalties large enough to change a company's incentives before the next heatwave.

The Legislative Council's finding on independence is the sharper problem, because it goes to whether the regulator can be trusted on the cases that are not this visible. An agency that relies on the same department for its budget, its staff and its policy settings as the industry it licenses has an obvious structural conflict, whatever the individual competence and good faith of its officers — and a state inquiry, not an activist group, is the body that concluded Tasmania had not fixed that conflict by 2023, seven years after the 2016 reform was meant to. The compliance-class system EPA runs is also opaque from the outside: the public sees a lease's class from 1 to 4, not the underlying monitoring data in enough detail to judge whether that rating is generous. A regulator whose scoring cannot be independently checked, sitting inside a department that also markets the industry it scores, is the textbook description of the capture risk the inquiry was called to test — and it found the risk real, not hypothetical.

The government's own response has been slow to catch up with its own evidence. The Legislative Council reported in November 2023; it took until August 2025, and a Premier needing crossbench votes to survive a second minority Parliament, for Jeremy Rockliff to commit to a genuinely independent EPA and a dedicated Marine Environment Tasmania Act — a near two-year gap between the state's own committee identifying the structural flaw and the government agreeing to fix it, and a commitment that, as at the time of writing, exists as a promise rather than as passed legislation (Premier of Tasmania, media statement, 17-Aug-2025). Storm Bay itself remains the least-tested part of the system: it has fewer years of monitoring data behind it than the older estuarine sites, and the "higher-energy water dilutes better" assumption that justified the expansion has not yet been proven at full commercial scale over a full climate cycle, including the marine heatwaves that drove the 2023 mortality event and are forecast to recur.

What the government got right

Some of this is inherited rather than caused, and some of it is genuine progress. The overstocked, slow-flushing estuaries that produced the worst of Tasmania's salmon-farming reputation were licensed by governments of both colours across three decades, not chosen by Rockliff; redirecting new growth to Storm Bay, on the government's own environmental logic, was a defensible response to that inheritance rather than a repeat of it. The shift from standing biomass caps to nitrogen-based TPDNO determinations is a real tightening of the rules, not a rebadging exercise, and it is now being extended zone by zone rather than left as a one-harbour fix. The EPA's Broadscale Environmental Monitoring Program and compliance-class ratings, however opaque to outsiders, are more than existed a decade ago, and the government did commission and publish the Legislative Council inquiry that found its own regulator wanting, rather than suppress it. The August 2025 commitment to independence, if legislated in full, would address the inquiry's central finding rather than manage around it. None of that undoes the beach at Okehampton Bay or the seven-year gap between the 2016 reform and the government accepting it had not gone far enough — but it is the difference between a government that has never acknowledged the problem and one that has been slow, under pressure, to act on its own evidence.