South Australian environment minister rejects opposition's call for royal commission into algal bloom

ABC NEWS (Australia)

South Australia’s deputy premier and environment minister, Susan Close, says the state has its own scientists to monitor its ongoing algal bloom. This, as the state opposition calls for a royal commission and the fishing industry appeals for urgent help to survive.

Transcript

00:00I think the Royal Commission is kind of a furphy. It's the sort of thing that people

00:05say in opposition. It spends a few million dollars on some lawyers. Curiously of course

00:09it would inevitably talk about the role of climate change whereas our branch of the Liberal

00:13Party recently passed a motion saying no net zero policy. Effectively we don't think climate

00:19change is something that should be responded to. So part of me thinks well let's have a

00:23Royal Commission just to prove them wrong on that. But it seems a terrible, really a

00:27red herring, to forgive me for that pun. What we need to do is we understand what's

00:32caused this. We need to act on supporting industry and also of course in as I said

00:37helping nature to recover. Those tasks are before us. We've got a lot of scientists

00:42involved. We've got the engagement of the Federal Government and I think the

00:46opposition is just trying to find a little place in the sun. So we've put in a first

00:49tranche of support and we are going to be adding to that very soon. We've been

00:55having a lot of discussions with the Commonwealth about how they can assist as well and we've

00:59started to put in some formal requests on that. The other element we can do is start

01:04preparing for recovery because this will go and we want to accelerate the growth of the

01:09regeneration of nature because that's the only way that we can be resilient in the face

01:14of these climate change impacts is if we have got really strong nature. So we're going

01:18to have to work out how we can help accelerate the recovery as fast as possible.

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