Mr. Richard Cronin:

I will do my very best. The Senator asked a couple of questions. One was about the monitoring programmes. I think she also raised a point about the paper parks. If I could say one thing about marine protected areas, it would be that this will be a process and an ongoing journey. It will not involve the drawing of a curtain, a map being produced and someone saying, "Here you are. The lines are on the map. Everybody can go home now." There has to be a monitoring process that underpins this, as the Senator rightly points out, that involves going out there and measuring what is happening. It was one way at the start. We put in place some control measures. It is now in a different state. We hope it has got better. There has to be an adaptive process that underpins this once we set conservation measures. We may want to protect it, we may want it to be this much better, we may want twice as many whales or we may want to protect the kelp forests or something like that. We will need to go out there, so there will have to be a process. Then we will have to decide whether the actions we are taking are good enough. If they are not, we must take more action. One of the key points from our engagement with stakeholders and on our own journey on this has been to understand that we will not say of this, "Here you go. There are your MPAs. Everybody can go home now." That is a challenge when you think about the sectors that need to operate because they have to get used to this new part of our set-up - this overdue part, I would hasten to add. There will be monitoring. There will have to be a level of adaption if we are not meeting our conservation objectives.

The Senator asked whether this will have an impact on fishing rights and the potential for overfishing. Whenever we are sent to committees to give evidence, we are always told not to say it is not our responsibility to answer a certain question. What I will say about fisheries is that in our conversations with the stakeholders and the fishermen and fisherwomen, we have found them to be one of the strongest groups who want marine protected areas for their stocks and for the future of their communities. All the fishermen we have met in our processes, both for the expert group and in our public consultation, want a future that has more protection. They have a strong voice in that they have rights and entitlements to fish. We have to make sure that as we create marine protected areas, their needs and the needs of nature are all included.

The Senator asked how much space marine protected areas will take up. If she looks at the map provided, she will see that 10% is about 49,000 sq. km and 30% is about 145,000 sq. km. I will add a small subtlety to that for everybody to think about. I do not have an answer to the following question, but this is the sort of thing I and people like me in other countries talk about when we meet. When we say 30%, of what are we saying it is 30%?

Is it 30% of everything or is it 30% of the plan, the sea floor or every species? We still have not received very strong answers to those questions. There are a couple of terms that relate to things being ecologically coherent, connected and resilient, but those terms have specific meanings that give us an answer to what 30% should look like. When we talk about, for example, connectivity in the sea, for a large whale, MPAs that are connected might be thousands of kilometres apart, depending on far it travels over its life cycle. For something living on the sea floor, connected means touching. Does that answer some of the Senator's questions?