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Proposal to transform wheatbelt salt lakes
A plan to transform Wheatbelt salt lakes into thriving ecosystems would provide investment and employment opportunities, says Shadow Environment Minister Brendon Grylls.
Mr Grylls' plan, called Living Lakes 2030, would use environmental science and engineering to turn parts of the sprawling agricultural salt lake catchments into permanent waterways that encourage shoreline tourism investment, local housing and job-creation projects such as commercial aquaculture and specialised tree crop businesses.
The project would establish a taskforce to investigate funding models for community-driven salt lake rehabilitation programs throughout the agricultural region, including possible access to federal funds from the National Action Plan for Salinity and Water Quality.
"Living Lakes 2030 is a big picture approach to enhance existing shallow salt lake systems and create permanent and accessible water bodies by using weirs, canals and channels," Mr Grylls said.
"It is an integral part of our commitment to tackling the problem of salinity.
"We want to rehabilitate salt lakes and degraded wetlands as part of this war against salinity and ultimately transform them into new centres of population and commercial opportunity."
Mr Grylls said Living Lakes 2030 would draw on technical experiences at the Lake Yarra Yarra catchment in the Perenjori shire as well as the Dumbleyung and Tambellup communities, where the natural cycle was given a helping hand through imaginative engineering and land management.
"Tambellup has already transformed a once-defunct, hyper-saline Gordon River ecosystem into an important regional ecosystem and community playground, and Dumbleyung is well advanced with its plans for a rebirth of its famous lake into a permanent water way," he said.
Mr Grylls said the Yarra Yarra Catchment Council had already received $137,500 from the National Landcare program, which would fund an integrated drainage and land management program where the lake would be rehabilitated and used as a recreational and scientific facility.
"A key part of the Living Lakes program will be to monitor water quality channelled off farming properties by WA's estimated 11,000 kilometres of deep drains and to improve it if necessary before allowing it to enter the lakes," he said.
"For much of the past 50 years, we have sat back and watched hundreds of inland creeks and other feeder systems silt up and come under attack from salt and have never really become serious about the possibilities of working with the salt lakes and enhancing their ecosystems.
"We desperately need to counter population drift to coastal communities, because as less people inhabit our Wheatbelt towns, there is less focus by governments to provide essential services.
"There is an opportunity to enhance important ecosystems such as the Yenyenning Lakes which form part of the upper Avon catchment, near Quairading."
Mr Grylls said Living Lakes would provide the critical volumes of water to enable inland desalination plants to be considered at sources of local potable or industrial water.
The CSIRO had developed research data on the potential for creating new industries to extract valuable raw materials from saline water using natural evaporation and solar energy.
"We intend to look at funding a pilot project to find the most effective means of extracting these high-value minerals in conjunction with a desalination project," he said.
Mr Grylls saw possibilities for lakeside tourism and resort-style golf courses using salt-tolerant grasses watered by desalinated or brackish bore water.
"You only have to look at the Peel and Harvey inlets and the watercourses at Busselton and Bunbury to imagine the possibilities for places like Yenyenning Lakes," he said.
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