This election, we’re desecrating 10,000 years for roughly 10,000 votes

Democracy doesn’t do well when it comes to representing the past, or anything before recent memory, and it isn’t much better for anyone — or anything — who can’t fill out a voting paper. Democracy doesn’t always do a good job of representing those living outside of marginal electorates, either. So, what if you’re a critically endangered creature who lives beyond a swing seat? Good luck!

So far in this election campaign, we’ve heard a lot about the cost of living. But the “cost of living” is only a fragment snapped off an even more important phrase: the cost of living on this land. Clearly, we have long forgotten that just five years ago, more than 1 billion animals on this continent were burned alive. In the same sliver of geological time, the states of our federation have watched hundreds of the continent’s human languages disappear.

Even more recently, in the last sitting week of Parliament — which was just a few weeks ago but already so long ago that we can’t remember — everyone was focusing on the budget. But while we pored over the details of another Jim Chalmers opus, a Labor-Coalition coalition (or Coalition²) was voting, once again, to weaken our already pitifully weak Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act.

Why? Because our soiled toilet paper of an environmental act was in danger of doing what our democracy wasn’t designed to do: protect an ancient, critically endangered species of ray — the Maugean skate — from the destructive and dubiously managed salmon farming industry.

The Maugean skate has lived in Tasmania’s Macquarie Harbour for thousands of years, and possibly since the last Ice Age, more than 10,000 years ago. About five minutes ago, Macquarie Harbour became part of the federal seat of Braddon. Until a few seconds ago, Braddon was a marginal seat, but at the last election it swung very firmly into the hands of Liberal MP Gavin Pearce.

Last weekend, less than a week before the federal election, thousands turned out for a rally against salmon farming at Hobart’s Parliament House. However, buoyed by the backing of the Coalition², the CEO of Salmon Tasmania, Luke Martin, said of the protesters that they “don’t care about facts, or the livelihoods” of salmon workers and their families.

Indeed, the justification given for weakening the EPBC Act was to save salmon jobs. But if that really was the aim, then the $37 million taken from our public purse to subsidise the industry could have paid out every one of the estimated 120 salmon workers in Macquarie Harbour.

In reality, the Coalition² has used salmon jobs as an excuse for weakening our environmental laws. From now into the future, it will be harder for communities to legally challenge environmental approvals, including not only salmon farming but also land-clearing, logging, and coal and gas developments.

Salmon, like the rest of our colonial enterprise, came to Macquarie Harbour much more recently than the Maugean skate, but this distinction matters little to democracy’s obsession with the present. Salmon stocks are ruining the harbour’s water quality and sucking up its oxygen, and as the skate faces extinction, more than 1,000 tonnes of salmon have died in crowded, stressful conditions where bacteria have thrived.

Around the world, there are abundant examples of salmon living better lives. Across jurisdictions in North and South America, open-net salmon farms of the kind used in Macquarie Harbour are being phased out. But what fate awaits Braddon’s Maugean skate? Before our eyes, we are watching democracy collapse 10,000 years into the roughly 10,000 votes required to swing the seat from one major party to another. The Voice referendum of 2023 (remember that?) told us that 65,000 years of presence is too much for our democracy to handle, so the outlook is not promising for the skates of Macquarie Harbour.

An unimaginably unique way of living in the world, and 40 million years of evolutionary history, is on the precipice of oblivion. But this is far from the end of the story, for on this precipice the skate is far from alone: across the continent, no less than 37 species are critically endangered, and another 40 are nearly there. How many lives, and how many billions of years of history, are we prepared to throw away?

Long, long before democracy ever got here, human and non-human kinships were bound by enormous, and enormously complex, continent-wide poems. “Australia was ruled by poetry for tens of thousands of years,” wrote Les Murray of these songlines, “prose only became its ruling principle after settlement in 1788”.

When politicians present us with a nice, flat slice of prose upon a plate, it’s only the topsoil of the land, and we’re being asked to pretend that we’re the owners of it, that we can speak over it, that we aren’t plundering and deforesting it for more overpriced and inefficient housing.

Will the skate’s fate influence your vote

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