No Answers on Antibiotic Risk to Rivers

Minister unable to answer questions about potential antibiotic contamination in our rivers raises serious public health concerns

 Today in Parliament I raised concerns with the Minister for Primary Industries, Gavin Pearce, about yet another government failure to properly regulate the salmon industry.

Although the salmon biosecurity program introduced in 2023 requires salmon hatcheries to “ensure that levels of antibiotics or chemical residues present within or outside a freshwater facility do not exceed any levels specified in the producer’s fish farming licence,” until last month the government had not imposed any licence conditions setting acceptable antibiotic levels. Nor was there any regulatory requirement for hatcheries to notify the EPA or the Department of Health of antibiotic use in our freshwater environment.

I asked the Minister: If salmon hatcheries were not required to report antibiotic use or test for antibiotic residues in their outflows until last month, how can we be confident that antibiotic residues have not been entering our rivers for years?

The Minister failed to answer this question, instead deferring to the Minister for the Environment, who took the matter on notice.

Later, the Minister for Environment informed the Parliament that testing is now occurring at Huon Aquaculture’s Meadowbank hatchery on the Derwent River and that new reporting and monitoring requirements will soon be imposed on all hatcheries. Yet her response still avoided the central question. That silence speaks volumes.

It raises the very real possibility that salmon hatcheries may have been releasing effluent containing antibiotics or antibiotic residues into our rivers—including drinking water catchments for months or years—without public knowledge.

Even trace amounts of antibiotics can contribute to emergence and spread of dangerous antibiotic-resistant bacteria in our drinking water and freshwater environment. The government’s inability to rule out this possibility today highlights yet another regulatory failure in its oversight of the salmon industry—one that may have placed public health at risk.