Grievance Debate

Algal Bloom

Mr BASHAM (Finniss) (16:03): I rise to talk about the algal bloom, which is certainly something that has been impacting my electorate for many, many months. It is nearly seven months to the day from when we first heard about it on social media, from the surfing community from Waitpinga. I guess my disappointment has been in the communication and engagement of this government from those early days right through until now. But I must actually commend the Minister for Health. In that first week, I wrote to the minister, and by that Friday he offered me a briefing from SA Health, which I had and which was really important in terms of getting that information out early.

That is the only time I have felt the government has been proactive in making sure the community understands quickly and succinctly what is going on. From that briefing, I did social media and gave my community the opportunity to have a bit of an understanding of what was going on.

From there, we saw things fall apart. It was only a few days later, on that weekend, when a university in Sydney that had been asked to do the testing to identify the variety of species in the algal bloom, being Karenia mikimotoi, published it online themselves before telling the government. The government did not inform the people of South Australia until the following day. We have seen these things go on all the way through. We have seen people very concerned by many things and we have seen conspiracy theories arise.

There was a significant time during that late March period where a large group of kangaroos were found to have died or been in the final stages of life and had to be euthanased. That was being linked to the algal bloom. In time we found out—but it took a couple of months before we got results—that it was more likely to be phalaris staggers, which is from a type of grass that grows in that region that is toxic if it gets a bit of rain on it during the autumn months, and green shoots pop up: the kangaroos are likely to have eaten the grass. We are seeing again a delay in informing the people.

This has continued right through. Only this afternoon a phone call was received from a surf business down on the south coast. Luke from Surf&Sun said he was disappointed he had had a school ring up and cancel an excursion to his business for him to teach the kids how to surf. The reason they had cancelled was not because the algal bloom had miraculously returned to the south coast—I agree with the Premier in his statement on radio yesterday that there has not been any algal bloom for months and months along the south coast, but whoever did the report on the app said there is foam and the water is discoloured. In the Premier's own words today in his answers during question time: that is the indicator brevetoxins are present.

Sadly, the River Murray also puts fresh water that is not the same colour as sea water out into that region of South Australia. It is often discoloured but it does not often have brevetoxins present. Often there is foam because the fresh water carries organic matter with it and, when it hits the salt water, it foams up. We have seen their own app lead to a business losing business. This is a very disappointing response from the government. If they published the results on the app too, saying the latest results were that there had been no detection of the algal bloom, that would give some confidence for that school to still have gone. But, no, they do not do that. They are only putting up a photo followed by a bit of assessment, not necessarily well-trained assessment, that has led to this business suffering.