The Coalition has a strong record supporting Australia’s fisheries and forestry sectors. We know they are vital to our economy, environment and way of life.

Together, Australia’s fishing and forestry industries contribute nearly $10 billion to the national economy.

They support thousands of jobs and small businesses, particularly in regional communities, while providing Australia and the world with clean, safe and sustainably sourced timber and seafood. Commercial and recreational fishing also make a substantial contribution to tourism and many local economies.

The Coalition wants to grow these industries, helping them to harvest and value-add more of what we need and consume. That means better investment opportunities, creating more jobs and more economic activity.

Despite this, Labor is pushing policies that threaten commercial and recreational fishing, restricting access to key fishing zones and imposing crushing red tape that undermine the industry’s viability. Our salmon farmers have been held hostage by the Albanese Government through a dubious, drawn-out environmental approval process. The businesses and livelihoods of Queensland gillnet fishers have also been crushed.

Meanwhile, the Greens have openly called for even more bans and “phasing out” of key fisheries.

The future of the salmon industry will be in serious jeopardy under a returned Albanese Government.

The reckless closure of native forestry operations in Victoria and Western Australia by Labor governments is a warning sign Tasmania and New South Wales are next.

This will cost thousands of jobs and raise the price of timber products, making the construction of new homes even more expensive. It will force Australia to import wood from countries with far weaker environmental standards.

Unlike Labor and the Greens, the Coalition believes these sectors must be managed responsibly and supported to grow.

These industries are not just vital—they are worth fighting for.

A Dutton Coalition Government will:

Provide lasting certainty to the salmon industry

Ensure government regulation is balanced and genuine

Put communities first on offshore wind

Establish new Permanent Timber Production Zones

Support Australian timber manufacturing

Crack down on illegal fishing

Deliver country of origin labelling that works for consumers and businesses

We will create a stronger economy to get Australia back on track. Our plan will ensure Australia’s fisheries and forestry sectors have certainty to grow, and remain strong, sustainable, and key parts of our nation’s future.

Our Plan

Provide lasting certainty to the salmon industry

A Dutton Coalition Government will secure the future of Australia’s salmon industry.

Unlike Labor, which subjected the Tasmanian salmon farming industry to an 18-month review process that placed its entire future in jeopardy, the Coalition will stand firm with the industry and end the uncertainty.

We will change the laws to stop such a catastrophic process from ever happening again.

We will immediately review Chilean salmon import requirements into Australia. This review will respond to concerns over the potential food safety risks to Australian consumers.

Tasmania’s salmon industry is a global leader, employing thousands of workers and contributing significantly to the state’s economy. It deserves far more than the lip service, quick political fixes and workarounds that Labor has offered.

Nothing is certain with the Labor Party if they are re-elected. Labor remains bitterly divided over protections for salmon farming in Macquarie Harbour.

A Labor-Greens government will unwind laws protecting the industry. Its radical Nature Positive agenda, with an out-of-control Federal Environment Protection Authority, will have devastating consequences for Tasmania.

We acknowledge the importance of protecting the Maugean Skate.

However, there must be a sensible, sustainable balance between the conservation of our precious and unique natural environments and safeguarding the economic and social future of our communities.

The Coalition will always stand on the side of supporting jobs, food production and regional prosperity – not political games that put entire industries at risk.

On-air challenge

Every answer today is a word or name with the syllable “gay” — phonetically, in any spelling — somewhere inside it.

Ex. Group of worshippers in a church —> CONGREGATION

1. Cousin of a crocodile

2. Big, fancy party

3. Japanese female dancer

4. Small bouquet

5. Person who plays Call of Duty or League of Legends

6. The “I” of F.B.I.

7. Russian composer Rachmaninov

8. River through Pittsburgh

9. Artificial watering of land for agriculture

10. Dance that’s the national dance of the Dominican Republic

11. Merrymaking or festiveness

Last week’s challenge

Think of a famous current actor. His first name is also the name of a famous movie character. Drop the middle letter of his last name and you’ll name another famous movie character. Each character is a central figure in a dozen or more films. What actor is this?

Challenge answer

Jason Bateman (Jason of the “Friday the 13th” movies + Batman)

Winner

Carina Aleckson of Minneapolis, Minn.

This week’s challenge

This week’s challenge comes from Joseph Young, of St. Cloud, Minn. Name certain female animals. Insert a T somewhere inside the word, and you’ll get a synonym for this animal’s offspring. What animals are these?

If you know the answer to the challenge, submit it below by Thursday, June 12 at 3 p.m. ET. Listeners whose answers are selected win a chance to play the on-air puzzle.

Copyright 2025 NPR

The legal risks of salmon farming

The detrimental effects of farmed salmon on the Kawésqar and other Indigenous Peoples interfere with the cultural and participation rights recognised under international human rights law. These include Indigenous Peoples’ rights to their lands, natural resources, and territories. These impacts may be so severe as to violate their right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment. The UN Special Rapporteur on the issue of human rights obligations relating to the enjoyment of a safe, clean, healthy and sustainable environment recognised as much after his visit to Chile. He encouraged the government to put in place “a moratorium on further expansion of salmon aquaculture pending an independent scientific review of the adverse environmental impacts”.

Under well-established international standards for responsible business conduct, companies have a responsibility to respect human rights including by providing environmental protection in their own operations and in all business relationships throughout their value chains.

Salmon companies must conduct due diligence in accordance with these international standards to prevent and address the negative human rights and environmental impacts of their own operations and those of their business partners throughout their value chain. Companies that fail to assess, mitigate, and address these impacts, or fail to engage meaningfully with relevant stakeholders, including local communities, expose themselves to significant financial and legal risks.

In this story, we examine the industry’s development and its impact on the cultural and participatory rights of Indigenous and local communities.

As a European seafood company, if you’re trading in salmon from Chile, you are likely facing hidden risks. Avoiding causing or contributing to environmental degradation or human rights violations starts with understanding them.

Download the factsheet to learn more

Photo Credits: Roberto Jequier / Daniel Casado

During the past four years, violent crime has been decreasing nationwide, according to the latest data. But rates of violent crime are mixed in the Mountain West.

The rate of violent crime decreased by 15% between 2020-2022, according to the FBI’s Crime Data Explorer. The national average in 2022 is 380 violent crimes per 100,000 people. Idaho and Wyoming’s averages were lower at 241 and 201, respectively. Meanwhile, Colorado (492) and Nevada (454) had higher averages, and New Mexico experienced violent crimes at nearly twice the national average at a rate of 780.

Most offenders are white men, followed by Black men. Yet, Black men are arrested more often, said Justin Nix, a Criminal Justice associate professor at the University of Nebraska Omaha.

“We know that non-white suspects are more likely to be arrested than white suspects and this is true after we control for things like severity of the crime, evidence, prior records,” Nix said. “Controlling for all those things does not wash the race effect away. The evidence tells us that race of the suspect matters.”

Institutional racism remains an issue, said Dr. Charis Kubrin, professor of criminology at UC Irvine, explaining why Black men are disproportionately represented in crime statistics.

“FBI reports 80% (of those arrested) are male,” Kubrin said. “We can compare that to the overall U.S. population, which is 49%. If we look at race and in particular African-Americans, we see that while they comprise 52% of homicide offenders, that’s much higher than their representation in the population.”

This story was produced by the Mountain West News Bureau, a collaboration between Wyoming Public Media, Nevada Public Radio (KNPR) in Las Vegas, Boise State Public Radio in Idaho, KUNR in Nevada, KUNC in Colorado and KANW in New Mexico, with support from affiliate stations across the region. Funding for the Mountain West News Bureau is provided in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

PUERTO NATALES, Chile — Out beyond Isla Focus, a bare island in the fjords an hour off the coast of Puerto Natales, southern Chile, the waves pick up and the Calipso rocks alarmingly from side to side.

Reinaldo Caro is the swarthy captain of the tiny fishing vessel, and he has spotted something amid the pristine Patagonian woodland high above the shoreline: a single, white-bark tree.

“There!” he exclaims suddenly, his thick eyebrows lifting as his face softens into a broad smile. “That’s where I was born.”

“And then that’s what I’m fighting against,” he says, tracing a path down the hillside with a finger, fixing it on a pontoon floating directly below his birthplace.

It belongs to one of the many salmon farms that dot the fjords, although from the surface, there isn’t much to see. A control room sits alongside several floating walkways.

The salmon farming industry operates along great swaths of Chile’s coastline, from the center of the country and down through Patagonia.

And Caro, 78, decries the effect it has had on his ancestral home.

He is one of the very last Kawésqar fishermen sailing these fjords, one of the seminomadic Indigenous peoples who navigated the channels for millennia in carved wooden canoes.

Today, there are fewer than 1,000 Kawésqar left.

“There are loads of these farms,” Caro says over the throb of the Calipso’s diesel engine.

John Bartlett for NPR / Reinaldo Caro surveys the shoreline of the Almirante Montt Gulf from the cabin of the Calipso on his way through the fjords toward the Kirke Channel.

With each pontoon that passes by, he reels off the name of the company which operates it and then the moniker he has for each tiny bay nearest to the farm.

In some, he says, Kawésqar would cut down the trees to make their canoes. In others, huddles of cormorants gather on the black sand beaches, and sea lions bark from the rocks.

“From up here it looks beautiful and pristine, like a mirror, but down there it’s a different story,” Caro explains. “The contamination is on the seabed — it comes from the feces and medication they give them.”

“Maybe 30 or 35 years ago, this place was totally pristine. Now we’re up to our necks in it,” he says bitterly.

In 2024, the United States, Japan and Brazil were the major markets for Chilean salmon, and more than half of the salmon available in U.S. supermarkets came from Chile.

After copper, the backbone of the Chilean economy accounting for more than half of the gross domestic product, salmon products are, albeit distantly, the country’s second-largest export.

Last year, $6.3 billion worth of salmon was sent abroad, according to the Chilean Salmon Council. One-quarter of the world’s salmon is farmed in Chile. Only Norway exports more.

Yet the fish are not native to these waters, and fishermen like Caro say that they are damaging Chilean ecosystems.

“I think it’s important to talk about how vulnerable these ecosystems are in general to change,” says marine biologist Claudio Carocca, who has written extensively about the effects of the salmon industry .

“In this case, the changes affected by human activity range from installing pontoons with their steel, plastic, ropes and lights; to the nonnative fish species introduced, and the chemicals and food injected to help them grow,” he says.

The Chilean Salmon Council, which represents the largest salmon farming companies in the country, declined NPR’s request for comment on the issues raised by the local community. The council’s website says salmon farming has the potential to provide “a healthy and sustainable source of protein” for growing global demand for quality foods. “We believe this can be achieved responsibly, caring for the environment and ensuring the highest environmental, social and animal welfare standards,” it says. The website also says the industry has worked to reduce the use antimicrobials.

Conditions in Chile are seen as ideal for salmon farming, with the first attempts to introduce salmon dating as far back as the 19th century.

In 1969, an agreement between Japan and Chile’s national fishing agency saw Pacific salmon formally introduced, bringing Dutch and Japanese companies into the country.

The national fishing service was then formed in 1976 under the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, and production skyrocketed from the mid-1980s.

A salmon usually reaches its commercial size and weight at 4 years old, but in a farm this is cut to 10 to 14 months.

John Bartlett for NPR / Leticia Caro, Reinaldo’s daughter, stands outside the rear cabin of the Calipso.

Reinaldo Caro’s daughter, Leticia Caro, grew up sailing these fjords with her father, who has always worked at sea.

She was 6 years old when she came out fishing with her father for the first time, where she’d help clean the fish and disentangle the nets.

“I think that things can be done differently, because salmon farming will never be sustainable,” she says.

“If the industry hadn’t moved into our home, the Kawésqar would probably still be living on these shores the way we always did. It’s vital that after thousands of years in these channels, the balance is maintained.”

Chile’s salmon industry has long been criticized for polluting the fjords and coastline, triggering record algal blooms, regular escapes that threaten native wildlife, as well as a heavy use of antimicrobials.

Salmon farms pump more than 350 metric tons of antibiotics into the sea each year. Given these quantities, the nongovernmental watchdog group Seafood Watch recommends that people avoid eating Chilean salmon unless it’s purchased from a certified, sustainable business.

However, legislation is in its final stage on its passage through Chilean congress that would deem salmon farming and the Kawésqar people’s traditional way of life in the area “totally incompatible,” halting the expansion of the industry.

Politicians are also debating whether to freeze or limit concessions on new farms in the southernmost waters.

John Bartlett for NPR / Reinaldo Caro hauls in his nets with a catch of sea bass in the Almirante Montt Gulf.

“They should go,” says Carocca. “But it’s not so simple — lots of people depend on the industry for work. What we need to ask ourselves is what is left when the farms move on? What will those people do?”

“Because we have already seen nearly 50 years of a model which doesn’t work, based on an exotic species which isn’t from here, and which requires so much to be added to the water for it to work.”

“It generates billions of dollars, but how many billions is all this destruction worth?”

Copyright 2025 NPR