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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1)
2024-11-28 Daily Xml
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Mesonet Weather Stations

Mr ELLIS (Narungga) (14:45): My question is to the minister representing the Minister for Primary Industries. What progress has been made on saving the ability of farmers in the Mid North to utilise existing weather monitoring infrastructure? With your leave, sir, and that of the house, I will explain.

Leave granted.

Mr ELLIS: COtL recently announced that stakeholders and clients of Mesonet would have been advised that the network will be shut at the end of the year and they will have to find alternative means of monitoring the weather.

The Hon. S.C. MULLIGHAN (Lee—Treasurer, Minister for Defence and Space Industries) (14:45): I thank the member for raising this important issue on behalf of many of his constituents who rely on this important sensing system to assist farmers with the information they need, particularly if they are engaging in chemical spraying activities, to make sure that they understand the prevailing weather conditions of the day.

By way of context, in South Australia the Conditions Over the Landscape (COtL) Mesonet provides a network of over 110 automatic weather stations across the Mid North, Mallee, Riverland, Limestone Coast, Langhorne Creek and McLaren Vale. These weather stations and the network that they comprise are designed to give chemical spray operators accurate local weather information to inform their decisions about how they can best engage in those spraying practices.

As of 2021, that has been centrally managed. It has been advised recently, in only the last 10 or so days, that the director of Conditions Over the Landscape has said that in the current operating environment they are struggling to maintain the network of these important 'weather stations', you could call them, and without sufficient revenues to maintain the service they may not be able to continue.

My advice is that they have already engaged with the government. In the past, they had received a grant—firstly under the previous Weatherill Labor government and again under the former Marshall Liberal government—to provide funding for specific parts of the project. This has been an endeavour that has required support from taxpayers in the past, and in the current circumstances it has become clear that there may be an opportunity to either assist the operators of the service directly or try to provide some assistance for them to secure funding from alternative sources, in an effort to address the important issue that the member raises today—that farmers and the operators of these spraying practices can have certainty about the local weather conditions by getting access to this important information.

I am advised those discussions are ongoing; they have not yet concluded. But I hope it is of some comfort to the member that they are being taken seriously and progressed and that the government is in direct communications with the operators of the service to try to arrive at a sustainable outcome for this important service.

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