Once again, we’re being told that the Great Barrier Reef is dying.

And once again, the data doesn’t seem to match up with the dooming. In fact, there’s a lot of reason to be tremendously optimistic about the Great Barrier Reef. But a healthy reef doesn’t attract any government grant money. Remember the $443 million grant that was given by then Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull to the Great Barrier Reef Foundation, a tiny and almost unheard of organization that had just six full-time employees at the time of the grant. They were deemed worthy of 443 million of your dollars. And we’ll take a look in a minute at where that money went.

But let’s begin this video by recognizing that the dying reef narrative is big business, which might be why the Australian Institute of Marine Sciences stopped reporting on the whole of reef coral cover in 2017, right as coral cover was rocketing upwards to record highs. Highs which have since been broken multiple times. We’ll get to that in a minute as well. It’s worth noting that since 2017 when they stopped publishing those graphs on the overall reef coral cover, they’ve received over half a billion dollars in funding. So, I think they could have afforded to keep reporting the overall reef coral cover if they’d wanted to, but it appears they did not.

Now, to be fair, they do still report on the three separate sections of the reef, the northern, central, and southern, but they’ve left it to researchers such as Bjorn Lomborg, whose work is excellent, by the way. Well worth a follow on X, to crunch those numbers and turn their three separate charts into a single of reef chart. And well, when you see it, you might have a theory as to why the Australian Institute of Marine Sciences stopped publishing their own graph. The fact is that the reef is doing just fine. What we’re discovering is that we don’t know nearly as much about the reef as we thought we did. And the experts are having a hard time coming to terms with that reality and coming to terms with the possibility that the gravy train they are riding might perhaps need to come to an end.

My name’s Topher Field. This is the Topher project and I help busy people like you to keep up with the world as it changes around you. And change is the word of the day when it comes to the Great Barrier Reef. And change is not necessarily a bad thing. Now, I am 100% viewer supported. So, if you appreciate me bringing you stories like this one, buy an Australian for Australians and about Australia, then please help me to keep the Topher project going by buying me a coffee via the button at topherfield.net. And check out my range of books, DVDs, t-shirts, and hoodies from goodpeoplebreakbadlaws.com.

If you’ve ever wanted to visit the Great Barrier Reef, but thought that it wouldn’t be worth it because it’s dying, can I encourage you to go ahead and book that trip? I’ve snuckled on the reef, and it is absolutely stunning. And the fact is that the reef is doing just fine if you avoid the areas which have been recently impacted by a cyclone or recently bleached from a summer heatwave, which is very easy to do because the reef is massive. And and this is the key to this story. It recovers from things like cyclones and from bleaching way way faster than we arrogant humans used to give it credit for.

The mainstream media are playing catch-up as the data calls them out and they’re finally telling kind of half truths with headlines like this one.

Great barrier reef volatile. Now, I say that that’s a half truth because it’s absolutely 100% true that the Great Barrier Reef is a vast, variable, rapidly changing, indeed volatile living organism. But the article, as you would expect, goes on to talk about how this volatility that we are observing today is different to how it used to be, that it’s bad, and that we are to blame.

The thing is, we only started doing serious surveys of coral cover on the reef in the 1980s. I’ve been alive for longer than we’ve been doing any kind of serious reef coral cover surveys. And contrary to popular belief, I’m not all that old. So, the arrogance of us to sit here proclaiming with less than 40 years of back data that we know jack about four-fifths of anything to do with the reef is just. But actually, that still doesn’t tell the story.

What they’re trying not to tell you in this headline and in others like it is that the reef is going great. In fact, it’s just about the best that it’s ever been in the 40 years since we started paying attention to it. Contrast this headline to a bunch of headlines from about 10 years ago. There’s this 2016 classic from Greenpeace saying why the Great Barrier Reef is dying. Or how about this one from the Guardian? The Great Barrier Reef, a catastrophe laid bare. Australia’s natural wonder, is in mortal danger. Bleaching caused by climate change has killed almost a quarter of its coral this year, and many scientists believe it could be too late for the rest. Using exclusive photographs and new data, a Guardian special report investigates how the reef has been devastated and what can be done to save it.

Well, that certainly was a bad year for the reef. That’s true. It was the worst coral bleaching event on record, according to a study reported by the BBC. The thing is that at that point 10 years ago, our records were 30 years. That was it. It was presumed that the level of breaching we saw was unprecedented because we had never seen that before. It was believed that the coral reef would recover slowly and would take in fact decades to recover from a bleaching event like that. The thing is there were a lot of assumptions going on. We had barely three decades worth of detailed data and everything was viewed through the lens of apocalyptic climate change. This narrative of doom.

So a big year of bleaching wasn’t just a big year of bleaching. It was the end of the reef. Only it wasn’t. Because what they weren’t mentioning is that this record bleaching had come off the back of a record rebound in coral cover the year before seen in the upward tick just before the downward one. And that this record bleaching event didn’t even erase the previous 1-year increase in coral cover. To say it another way, the one-year increase was larger than the record bleaching decrease. But you won’t find a single headline anywhere acknowledging that incredible increase the year before the bleaching. And trust me, I’ve looked for it.

But that was 10 years ago. What about now? Well, like I said, the Australian Institute of Marine Science no longer report on the total coral cover.

The coral cover over the entire reef presented in a single graph. They don’t do that. They only report on each of the three main sections, northern, central, and southern. But I also mentioned earlier a man by the name of Bjorn Lomborg who used the Ames data to create this. Now the orange line that you see is the official Ames whole of reef data which stops a few years ago. Lomborg has then taken their data from each section of the reef northern, central and southern and backfit it that data to discern the relative weightings of each section. And you can see his result is a pretty good fit for the historical official data. So, it’s clear that his calculations going forward will also be pretty close to what the official data would have been had they published it. And based on that, look where we are in 2025. The last four years running have been the top four years for coral cover on the Great Barrier Reef since we started making records 40 years ago.

Now, again, 40 years worth of data is not enough to know anything about anything. But the one thing we can say for sure is that that is not what a dying reef looks like 10 years ago, the Guardian told us that a quarter of the reef had died and that it was perhaps too late for the rest. 10 years later, the reef is alive and well. But nobody told the media the good news because they’ve dialed the doom mongering up to 11 this year with a spate of apocalyptic headlines about record coral bleaching and loss. But nowhere in these articles can I find an acknowledgement that even after this record loss, this apocalyptic bleaching event, the unprecedented catastrophe of this year, it’s still the fourth highest coral cover ever recorded on the reef with levels well above what they were when we first started taking records 40 years ago. They don’t mention that. Weird, right? It’s almost as if they’re not here to keep you informed. They’re here to push a narrative. And speaking of pushing narratives, remember the Great Barrier Reef Foundation, the mob who got that $443 million in taxpayer funding when no one knew who they were and they had only six full-time employees?

Yeah, those guys. They are well and truly on board the doom and gloom narrative, as you would expect, with this classic headline coming from April 2024. Apparently, the Christmas of 2023-24, that summer, was the worst summer on record for the reef. That’s the one. See that little arrow I put up there? That’s the year. And then the reef went on to immediately set a new record high the very next year.

What we’re seeing here is the truth that well, yeah, coral cover on the reef is much more volatile than we previously assumed.

And I emphasize that word deliberately because the fact is that with less than 40 years worth of back data, we honestly have no idea how much volatility is actually normal on the Great Barrier Reef. We just don’t. And if what we’ve seen in the last 10 years tells us anything, it tells us that actually coral cover on the reef can change much faster than we thought it could. Not just down, but up as well, which is great news and suggests that the reef is in far better health than these doom mongers would like us to believe.

So what is this really all about then? Well, I would suggest that you could do worse than to follow that old adage, follow the money. Now, I’m not accusing anyone of corruption here. I have no specific evidence of any specific corruption. But if you were looking for corruption, ask yourself just how many red flags you would need to see before thinking that perhaps you might have found something. In April 2023, the ABC published the following information specifically about this $443 million grant and the foundation that it was given to. The ABC said this, “The money was paid in full in 2018 for delivery over 6 years ending in June 2024.

Side note, they do this this paying in full upfront so that future governments have a harder time clawing that funding back. It’s pretty clear that the then Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull really really really wanted this money to go to this group.” Back to the quotes. When the coalition announced the funding, the foundation had six full-time employees. In 2019, both a Senate committee and Australia’s auditor general found the grant to be an unsound decision. The decision had no tender process and the foundation had not been consulted prior.

Side note, what? $443 million to an organization with six employees that supposedly had no idea that the money was even coming their way. How many red flags do you want? This ABC article claims ludicrously in my opinion that the money has been well spent and transparently spent. Nothing to see here. Move along. They report that the auditor general themselves looked into it in 2021 and agrees that the money was spent appropriately. But the auditor general also found that the Great Barrier Reef Foundation didn’t always have written contracts with their vendors. Let’s not forget this is a lot of money changing hands here and that their tenders were not sufficiently open as well as other governance issues. This begs a lot of questions of the auditor general.

The money went through that Great Barrier Reef Foundation and via them out to the usual suspects, professional climate grifters sucking perpetually on the teeth of taxpayers, preaching a doom that never seems to come. The CSRO and James Cook University are standouts in my opinion. But notable inclusions also are an Aboriginal corporation, tourism board, environmental groups, and of course, consultants. Now, I’m not suggesting that anything untoward took place, but if I were inclined to feel that there were a few too many red flags here and I wanted to go digging for any inappropriate spending, it’s the consultants where I would start, followed closely by those environmental organizations and Aboriginal corporations.

Hmm as of the time of the writing of this article that I’m reading from back in 2023, this was how the money had been spent at that date. A cool $100 million on water quality, 37 million on the crown of thorns starfish, nearly 50 million on restoration and adaption science, 4 million for community reef protection, 11 million for traditional owner reef protection. What is that? And finally, 13 million for monitoring and reporting. And hey, good news everybody. Clearly, it was money well spent because look, the reef is doing great.

Except that absolutely no one thinks that the $443 million spent on top of all the other money already being spent elsewhere on the reef has made a lick of difference to the outcomes for the Great Barrier Reef. Not the media, not the environmental groups, and certainly none of the institutions on the receiving end of these million, if not multi or hundred million worth of grants. They could, if they wanted to, claim credit for this rebounded coral reef cover if they were cynical enough. But it turns out that they’re even more cynical than that because they are pretending that the rebound isn’t even happening. And they are demanding ever more money to fix a problem that shows no sign of actually existing.

Forgive my cynicism, but the fact is that none of these organizations would benefit from solving the threat to the Great Barrier Reef.

Their relevance, their funding, their very survival depends on the reef being in grave danger. And so, according to them, it always will be in grave danger. And hey, for $443 million, can you really blame them? Now, this is not to say that there are no dangers to the reef whatsoever. There are, and they need to be looked at realistically and without hysteria. But unfortunately, thanks to the doom mongering of these professional fear mongers, it is difficult, if not impossible, to have a rational conversation about anything because they are too busy spreading gloom about the loss of coral whilst making no mention of the record highs.

So, like I said, if you want to go see the reef, go see it. It is amazing. It is alive and well. Just do a little research before you go so that you can avoid the regions that have just had a bleaching event or have just had a cyclone. But don’t worry, give it a few years and you’ll be able to head to those very spots and admire just how quickly this reef bounces back and you’ll be able to have a chuckle at just how naive and arrogant we were to think that we already understood something as incredible as the Great Barrier Reef after just 40 years of observations.

My name’s Topher Field. This is the Topher Project and this is what I do. I cut through the media narrative with facts and logic and try to bring balance to the desperately unbalanced propaganda that fills our media landscape. If you appreciate what I do, then please head over to topherfield.net and buy me a coffee. I do my best work when I’m caffeinated and angry. And if you provide the caffeine, I’ll bring the anger and you’ll keep seeing more content like this. And if you like my videos, you will love my books about civil disobedience in the modern age. Sadly an important topic for us at this time. And then there’s my DVD and other merch which is all available from goodpeoplebreakbadlaws.com.

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