Frome Electorate Environmental Concerns

Ms PRATT (Frome) (15:26): I want to update the house on the problems that I see bubbling away in my electorate. My electorate of Frome is groaning under the impact of a number of environmental disasters. You only need to go back 18 months where the Adelaide Plains were impacted by the arrival, unprecedented in our country, of the tomato virus. The grapegrowers in the Clare Valley have been impacted by frost two years in a row. Of course, all the farmers across the Mid North of my electorate are still calculating the cost of the drought.

It might not be known to many but the electorate of Frome is proud to capture and host the Samphire Coast which extends just past the Gawler River from Port Gawler, Middle Beach, Thompson Beach up to Port Parham and beyond. The communities that live along there are proud of their environment. They love the peace and solitude. They look after their environment and they are worried about their environment, and they are right to be worried. But they are not leaving the responsibility of the preservation of that Samphire coastline to local government or government alone. They are hands-on.

I was delighted to join a number of volunteers as part of the Friends of the Adelaide International Bird Sanctuary. It is not well known. It is an extraordinary, pristine environment just west of Dublin. The project over the weekend, for a membership of about 30 people but nine volunteers who were attending on Sunday, was to plant out 250 seedlings of she-oak, native pines, quandong, lomandra and dianella to revegetate that area.

Why is that important? Well, of course, that provides cover and nesting areas for these migratory shorebirds; 27,000 of them would call the bird sanctuary home, if we asked them, but they are part of a five million-sized flock that flies between Siberia and my electorate. They are pretty hungry when they get here. They will fly for 10 days without stopping. The smallest bird that lands at the International Bird Sanctuary is called Tim Tam, affectionately, weighing only 30 grams. It goes 10 days without food. The biggest is a curlew. When they land at Port Parham, they are pretty hungry, and the algal bloom is sadly at risk of compromising that essential food source.

These birds feed on the mudflats around the area, looking for worms, molluscs, shellfish and insects. It is not that the bloom causing the death of those food items, the natural food source, would kill the bird, but when that food source is diminished there is going to be less for 27,000 birds to consume. I was informed of all these details by Mary-Ann and Lucy, who are part of the friends group, and I was pleased to meet Alessandro and Adam, who are part of the SA park rangers program.

The Samphire Coast in my electorate is being impacted by the algal bloom, and we see that with the fishing community as well. I met a fisherman called Andrew Pisani when I was at the Minlaton forum last week. The efforts that fishermen are having to go to—abandoning quotas and licences that they have and paying extra money to find a licence somewhere in less affected waters—are certainly compromising that industry and we know that they are hurting.

Professor Mike Steer is doing a great job of informing our community about the algal bloom, but I think it is passing strange that when satellite images from March to July showed the growth, expansion and increase of chlorophyll hotspots, which are a proxy for the bacteria, and purple spots on these images that reflected the fish kills, the government was not in a position to act faster. The Premier is tying himself in knots when he talks about the communities that do not know which beach is affected and which is not. The opposition continues to call for the tourism voucher to be rolled out across the state. We think it is positive, proactive and practical.