Brad Fish: "Another myth which is out there is about shipping within the Reef and, there’s been statements about the Great Barrier Reef being a coal highway and so forth there. Some of the numbers put out there by organisations such as Greenpeace and so forth suggest there could be 10,000 coal ships by the end of the decade.  Our numbers, and I’ll suggest to you our numbers are very very accurate numbers on the way through, and on the high side, so taking the highest estimates going forward, so the very optimistic estimates going forward, show that we only have just over 4,000 ships compared to the Greenpeace 10,000 ships. And given the current downturn of the market I’ll be very surprised if we could even achieve the 4,000 ships going forward.  That said the Great Barrier Reef is a very large area.  It stretches approximately 2,000 kilometres from north to south.  On any one day if you flew from one length of the Reef to the other length of the Reef you’d be hard pressed to find more than a handful of ships within that Reef at any one point in time.  So people coming up and saying that we have a coal highway is just so far from the truth.  But again we wish to push out the facts and ensure that we are, the information we put out there has to be correct.  It has to be substantiated as opposed, unfortunately, to some of the people who are pushing against our projects who can throw idle comments out there without any real scientific justification at all."

Categories: Activism, Environment, Great Barrier Reef
Author: Brad Fish