Barbara Pocock (SA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister for the Environment and Water (Senator Watt) to a question without notice asked by Senator Hanson-Young today relating to algal bloom in South Australia.

South Australians love their beaches, and I certainly number myself amongst them. In May of this year, I spent a week down at the Victor Harbor area of our state and witnessed there, for the first time personally, the awful yellow sludge that was flowing across our beaches and blowing along the coast of our beautiful state. I spoke to a number of surfers, to small-business people and to fisherpeople about the impact and the fear they held about what was coming our way as a result of a toxic algal bloom that we did not understand. I felt its effects on my own skin. Surfers talked about the impact of skin reactions and about the impact on their own lungs.

But, since that time, we have witnessed an unfolding crisis—a loss of hundreds and hundreds and thousands of marine creatures along our South Australian shores. Not so long ago, I went to the public meeting of South Australians at the Brighton & Seacliff Yacht Club. Hundreds of South Australians came out to share their grief at the crisis unfolding in the places they love and to the creatures that they care about. Many were citizen scientists who themselves have collected the dead bodies of seals and of large creatures like sharks. We've seen dead dolphins. We've seen all species of fish, and we've seen our very rare sea dragons, coming up in their hundreds, stranded on those shores.

South Australians have been deeply shocked by what we have witnessed, and what we've seen on our shores is a small part of what is going on under the waves. There is a bushfire equivalent underway in the waters off the South Australian coast. It is deeply shocking, and it is a major crisis for many of our industries that depend on that marine life. We've got people whose livelihoods are threatened very fundamentally—who haven't caught a fish for months or whose oyster leases are at risk. Not only are we seeing right now the dead bodies of marine life, which really concerns us; the concern is that this is going to go on for months and months and possibly years and affect those livelihoods.

We also see, as we sit here, the possibility of that algal bloom reaching up into the top of the gulf and threatening species and tourist industries that are incredibly important to us—the giant creatures that thousands of Australians visit and see at the top of the gulf, and the beautiful underwater nature that is there is now at risk from this bloom. As my colleague Senator Hanson-Young made clear, if this were happening in Bondi or if this were happening in St Kilda, we would have a COVID-level response. It would have kicked into gear months ago. Instead, we have waited four months for Minister Watt to get to South Australia and spend the 11 minutes that he did on the shore in our state looking at our problem, and he wrote a cheque and he matched the cheque of our Premier Malinauskas. It's a small cheque. When you look at the millions of dollars that are going to go out of those industries and cost our South Australian economy, it is so far from what is needed to support those businesses.

I also want to talk about the scientists who came along to the public meeting not so long ago and showed us the images of what it looked like under the jetty on Yorke Peninsula six, eight and 10 months ago and what it looks like now. It is devastating. It is truly shocking that we are going to see more and more of these algal blooms around our country on a reef system that stretches from right over towards New Zealand to beyond Perth. This is the southern reef system, which is potentially being affected over time by rising ocean temperatures that scientists have been telling us about for years. They have been saying increases in ocean temperature are going to put our coastal marine life at risk, and it's partly driven by changes in the underwater ecology. We know our seagrass systems and our giant kelp systems are not what they were. Over decades, they have changed. And they are a natural rehabilitation, we hear, from the scientists, of that algae. But they are gone; they've been decimated.

But the really important difference now is that we are reaping the product of fossil fuels and their impact in driving a climate crisis that is increasing the temperature of our oceans, risking our beautiful marine life and not only our economic wellbeing but so many things that South Australians treasure. (Time expired)

Question agreed to.