(Cameron: … Environment Minister, Peter Garrett … from their perspective it’s okay for the State Government to go ahead and build regulators around the Goolwa Channel without conducting an Environmental Impact Statement … a lot of people are concerned that there is no Environmental Impact Statement going ahead …your perspective on the decision by Peter Garrett to allow these buns to be built without an EIS?) … I am very concerned about the cynical time of this announcement by Peter Garrett … here we are, budget day in Canberra, there’s only one news story in town effectively and that is the budget. All of the Federal Parliamentary Press Gallery are locked away in the budget lockup. We know that The Advertiser and all the other newspapers tomorrow will be awash with budget stories and there’s no room for critical analysis of this decision by Minister Garrett, who was due to make it some days ago, but quite clearly held off to announce it under the bushel of hiding under the budget … (Cameron: … I pushed him on that … about the timing … he said that he was waiting for more information and he wanted to see all the information, which he finally received this morning and that’s why he released his information this afternoon. He claims that he hasn’t been sitting on it …) … that’s the Minister’s answer … you’ll excuse me if I’m a little cynical about that … these issues are serious ones for South Australia, they’re serious ones for the future of the Lower Lakes and they deserve to be dealt with at a time when they can have proper attention and proper scrutiny and the Minister appears to be dodging it … by announcing it today … I think it is a concern that we are not having an Environmental Impact Statement on this. I am very worried that there hasn’t been the full exploration of the issues. I recognise that it will be welcomed by a lot of people in the Goolwa community who are doing it extremely tough and I hope that it works, that it works for them, and that there are not any environmental repercussions from the decision, but we need to be very careful going forward that every aspect of the Government’s decisions on the Lower Lakes does have proper environmental assessment … one of the real criticisms of the State Government approach and the Federal Government approach is the lack of any holistic consideration of all of these applications. We have applications for the bungs or the barriers or the temporary regulators or whatever you call them around Goolwa. We have an application for the Wellington Weir, we have a separate application for the admission of seawater into the lakes … all of these things are being considered far too much in isolation rather than a comprehensive approach to how the Lower Lakes are tackled should they reach further crisis point, as sadly appears to be the case.