Alannah Mactiernan (Perth, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would like also to associate myself with the remarks of the member for Fremantle and to pass on my condolences to Conor's family and to Melissa's staff. It has been a very difficult time for them, but I also associate myself with the remarks congratulating Melissa for being prepared to accept the ability and not be deterred by the disability of Conor.

I want to speak on a different topic today. The Western Australian government has spent $22 million on a shark drum line trial this year. It caught 163 sharks—that is $200,000 per dead shark. The problem is that none of these sharks were great whites. All of the seven deaths that have occurred in the last four years in the southern half of Western Australia have been by great white sharks.

Yesterday in Parliament House, we had an impressive presentation from a group of scientists from the University of Western Australia Oceans Institute. They were urging the federal government not to renew the exemption that had been given to the state government to enable them to avoid the EPBC Act's endangered species provisions for the duration of that trial. They asked us to recognise that the scientific evidence of the ineffectiveness of those drum lines is reflected in the fact that not one of the culpable species was caught.

They set out the nonlethal alternatives. The institute is part of a massive collaboration, tagging nearly 200 great white sharks. This has provided a massive amount of data that gives us a much better understanding of shark habits. Over summer, they tweet the alerts about the presence of sharks near beaches. They also set out the progress of the Optus-Google R&D project, Clever Buoy, which can detect untagged sharks. This shark detection system has been trialled on the Abrolhos Islands and it is still being finessed. Their algorithms still need to be developed a little further so that they can successfully distinguish between dolphins and sharks to make sure that they do not give false positives.

The scientists also endorsed the effectiveness of Shark Shield, which is the personal shark repellent device. They dispelled the misinformation that has been spread about that technology, such as the rumour that it had the potential to attract sharks to swimmers and surfers. All in all, it appears that there is a great deal of capacity for us to deal with this problem in a much more scientific way, and I urge this federal government to listen to this research. (Time expired)