Transcript Announcement of Camden Sound Marine
BARNETT / FARAGHER Announcement of the Camden Sound Marine Park off the Kimberley. COLIN BARNETT Can I first just acknowledge Donna Faragher as Minister for Environment, and also to Kieran McNamara, who is the CEO of the Department of Environment and Conservation. The Kimberley is a spectacular part of Australia. It is a vast area some twice the size of the State of Victoria. To fly across the Kimberley from Broome to Kununurra is the same as flying from Melbourne to Sydney. It is a pristine environment, a vast and spectacular landscape. A unique species both in terms of the land, the coastal marine environment, and a unique plant variety also. During the last State Election the Liberal Party recognised the significance of the Kimberley, and as part of that we made a commitment to a science and conservation strategy for the Kimberley with substantial funding to put that in place. I think it’s also important that at time the we recognised, and I think most West Australians recognise, that unique and faraway and vast that the Kimberley is, there are all sorts of emerging pressures on the Kimberley region. In a sense the Kimberley has been discovered. While it has a long history of indigenous occupation, thousands of years, and the culture and the heritage that flows from that, it’s had over a hundred years of a pastoral industry, in the last 20 years we’ve seen the development of tourism, particularly concentrated around the Broome area. We’re now seeing the more than doubling of the Ord River irrigation project, a huge potential for agricultural production also in the Fitzroy Valley.
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