SPEAKER: A very exciting announcement today of the AquaWatch program. And I’m here with the Minister for Industry and Science, Ed Husic, and Minister for Environment and Water, Tanya Plibersek, and, of course, with the Chief Executive of CSIRO, Larry Marshall. So with no further ado, I’ll pass over to my good friend and colleague, the Minister for Industry and Science, Ed Husic. 

ED HUSIC, MINISTER FOR INDUSTRY AND SCIENCE: Thank you very much, David. It is a great pleasure to be able to join you, as always, and with my ministerial colleague and friend Tanya Plibersek to talk today about a really important initiative. But before I start, I want to acknowledge that we’re on the land of the Ngunnawal, and if any people got very early on, the importance of water in terms of life and culture, it is our First Nations communities. And I want to pay respects to Elders past and present. 

Today is a very important day, a very big step forward, landing on a particular day in the calendar that my colleague Tanya Plibersek will talk about, but AquaWatch itself will play a very important role with the work of the CSIRO and SmartSat in being able to provide effectively a weather service for water. Waterways form a big part of Australian culture, regardless of whether you live on the coast or inland. We’ve always had a connection to water. The quality of that water is also very, very important, and being able to have a monitoring service that can detect toxic algal blooms, irrigation runoffs, general water quality is really important because across the globe, low water quality can, in terrible instances, contribute to large-scale death and illness, and we have an opportunity to use Australian know-how to be able to protect Australians and also give them the confidence to maintain that connection to water that is so important to us all. 

And the work of being able to link up both ground-based detection as well as the work of being able to use space infrastructure, coordinating that in a way to be able to make those vital assessments and detections, this work that’s being done through AquaWatch is incredibly important. We’ve launched the mission as well through the CSIRO being able to focus the work of a lot of people, multidisciplinary, to make sure that this is a success. Very, very critical. 

So I want to congratulate in terms of the CSIRO and SmartSat for coming together in this very important collaboration. I might hand over to Tanya to contribute further. 

TANYA PLIBERSEK: Well, thanks so much. We’re here on World Water Day. And it’s worth acknowledging that we live on the driest continent in the world and water is absolutely critical to life in Australia. And as Ed said, we’ve got 65,000 years of culture and history to draw on to understand how we best manage our water resources here in Australia, and we’ve got the best of modern science here with us today. 

Water quantity is something that we have struggled to manage in Australia, if you look at the Murray Darling Basin and see one of the first big international efforts to make sure that we allocate our water fairly, to protect the environment, to support the agricultural sector, to make sure that the towns and communities that rely on the Murray Darling river system get the water they need for drinking and other uses in their towns. 

It’s a massive effort to make sure that we’ve got enough water for these different uses. We also need to make sure that the quality of that water is good for the environment, good for the industry, good for drinking and good for the uses humans need water for. And so this is an incredibly exciting step forward. It’s like a weather service for water. 

I’m excited about this because when you see the tragic events like the massive fish kills in Menindee, it shows how very important it is to be able to predict events like the black water event that seems to be responsible for this mass fish killing. If you look at the Great Barrier Reef, we know that water quality is one of the biggest pressures on the health of the Great Barrier Reef. If we are able to show where fertilisers, nutrients are entering the waters around the reef and to prevent that from occurring, because we’ve got this sort of real time monitoring, we can improve the health of the reef and all of the animals and plants that rely on it. 

So from an environmental point of view this is a really exciting step forward. And I want to congratulate Minister Husic, the CSIRO and everybody involved in this project for making an enormous difference to our national waterways. 

ENDS