The consultation on the proposed expansion of Norfolk Marine Park – and on the development of a new standalone management plan – closes on 30 September. I have now made submissions on both.
My position is fairly simple. I support the expansion. But a bigger marine park is not automatically a better-managed marine park. Norfolk Island is different, and its marine park and its management should reflect that. This is where I have landed.
Yes – I support the expansion and the name change to Norfolk Island Marine Park.
The proposed park would cover 430,792 km², with 94 per cent in the highly protected National Park Zone. I strongly support protecting the Norfolk Ridge, its seamounts and deep-water habitats, and excluding mining, oil and gas extraction from these waters.Yes – I support continued sustainable local fishing.
Fishing here is not simply another recreational activity. It is tied to food, culture, family and generations of knowledge of the sea. Norfolk’s fishing community also has a history of voluntarily restricting its own activities when stocks needed protection. Local autonomy and conservation are not opposites.But the expanded Special Purpose Zone should not become an invitation for substantially increased outside commercial fishing.
Its purpose should remain closely connected to Norfolk Island’s community, culture and food security, with ecological sustainability setting the limits.I am not convinced Cascade needs to be removed from the Marine Park.
The proposal would excise about 1.28 km² around Cascade Pier to allow future port infrastructure. I understand perfectly well that Norfolk needs functioning ports. What I do not understand is why Cascade has to be taken out of the Marine Park to achieve that. The consultation material itself says that ‘structures and works’ can be authorised, subject to assessment, inside the park. So my question is simple: if the work can be authorised within the Marine Park, why remove the protection?I am particularly concerned about the precedent that could create for Kingston.
Cascade and Kingston are both working ports, but Kingston sits immediately beside a highly valued and already stressed coral reef. Twenty years from now, the people making these decisions will be different. If Cascade is excised because it is a port, it becomes easier for somebody in future to ask why Kingston should be treated differently. If the Cascade excision proceeds, I want the decision to state explicitly that it is site-specific and does not establish a general principle that Norfolk’s ports should sit outside the Marine Park.A 430,000 km² marine park has to be more than a very large green area on a map.
How will it actually be policed? How much will rely on vessel tracking and remote surveillance? How often will physical patrols occur? What capacity will exist on Norfolk when somebody sees something unusual? The Commonwealth is proposing a very large protected area; it needs to provide the resources required to protect it.The little bit of reef beside us must not disappear inside an enormous offshore park.
Emily and Slaughter Bays are already inside the Marine Park, and the no-take protections introduced there were worthwhile. But a no-take area cannot fix a septic system. A marine-park boundary cannot stop sediment coming down a waterway after heavy rain. Fishery regulation cannot remove nutrients travelling through groundwater. Protecting the reef also means dealing with what comes off the land.That means managing Norfolk from ridge to reef.
Wastewater, groundwater, stormwater, grazing, erosion, wetlands and coastal works may be administered by different bits of government, but the reef receives the combined result. I want the new management plan to establish who acts when monitoring shows something is going wrong – not merely who produces another report.Local people need a genuine place in management.
I have proposed a permanent, place-based Norfolk Island advisory committee with substantial local representation – fishing knowledge, culture, conservation, tourism, science and younger members of the community. Not simply one or two Norfolk representatives sitting on a large regional committee. And if substantive local advice is not followed, there should be an explanation as to why.We need to be able to tell whether the new management plan actually worked.
Ten years from now, I want us to be able to ask some fairly basic questions. Did water quality improve? Did avoidable local pressures decline? Did coral recruitment improve? What happened to coral disease and algal cover? Did the ecosystem show signs of recovery? A management plan should measure ecological outcomes, not simply meetings held, projects approved and hectares protected.And impacts do not stop at the Marine Park boundary.
If dredging, coastal works, pollution or another activity outside the park affects the reef inside it, that is still a Marine Park problem. The reef experiences climate stress, nutrients, sediment, disease and physical disturbance together. We need to get much better at considering that cumulative load rather than treating every new project as if the reef starts from scratch.
So, yes, I support the expansion.
I think there is a great deal in this proposal worth protecting, and creating a standalone Norfolk Island Marine Park gives us an opportunity to do something genuinely useful.
But the measure of success will not be the number of square kilometres coloured green on a map. It will be whether the rules can be enforced, whether local knowledge has a meaningful place in management, whether pressures coming from the land are actually tackled, and whether the reef at our doorstep is in better condition because it sits inside a Marine Park.
I’ll put my full submission below for anyone who wants to read the reasoning in more detail. And if you have views of your own – for, against, or somewhere in between – this is the time to put them in. The consultation closes on 30 September 2026.
Looking east from Kingston Pier along the length of the Kingston Lagoon at dawn, Norfolk Island