Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young caused an uproar in Australia's Parliament on Wednesday night by pulling out a large dead fish during question time.
She was protesting a new law supporting Tasmania’s salmon farming industry, which environmentalists say threatens the survival of the endangered Maugean skate, a species found only in Macquarie Harbour.
To reel in her point, Hanson-Young pulled the dead fish in a plastic bag and held it aloft in the Senate chamber.
“On the eve of the election, have you sold out your environmental credentials for a rotten, stinking extinction salmon?” she shouted, slamming Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s position while waving the fish around.
The stunt sparked both laughter and outrage, with Senate President Sue Lines swiftly stepping in.
“Senator Hanson-Young, it is a prop. Remove it,” Lines said, after calling for order.
Despite the fishy protest, the bill passed with support from Labor and the Coalition.
It’s not the first time a politician has made a splash with dead fish in Parliament.
In 2013, then-New Zealand Labour leader David Shearer brought two dead snappers into the House during a debate on recreational fishing limits.
As the National Government considered cutting the daily bag limit and increasing the legal size of snapper, Shearer held up two different-sized fish and asked, “Does he think it’s fair a commercial fisher can catch a snapper as small as 25 centimetres, but a recreational fisher has to go to 36?”
Then Prime Minister John Key hit back, quipping if Shearer's new chief of staff had suggested the stunt, "then she's dead as well".
Key then asked Shearer to table the larger of the two snapper so he could “have it for dinner.”
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