Confessions of a Clean Up Oz Day candidate

My confession is that I'm a big fan of the warm and fuzzy feeling.

Clean Up Australia is one of those events that you can’t help get a warm a fuzzy afterglow from. This Sunday ranked highly on the Clean-upometer. We cleaned up a wetland, nature’s filter. This wetland had been filtering plastic bottles and Styrofoam. We collected bags of bottles and plastic bags full of plastic bags. No matter when you decide to do Clean-Up, you’re always guaranteed of finding a plastic bag to put the rubbish in.

As I was carefully and creatively swinging through the mangroves (to avoid damaging the roots) I was thinking about the beauty of these amazingly diverse ecosystems and wondered where would we be without our wetlands?

Wetlands are fish nurseries. Some of the items we considered cleaning up had been in place for so long that they had become habitat, a plastic bottle with a hole in both ends is probably considered quite an up market crevice in the Piscean community. There were lots of little fish flitting between the mangroves, and this was just a small patch of wetland. In Lake Macquarie where recreational fishing is a major pastime, wetlands contribute to the local economy too.

Another item which was left for habitat purposes was a length of silt-mesh, a fabric designed to stop soil particles from entering the stormwater system or water ways, it had been in the water for some time, the mangrove roots were growing through it and there were a few crustaceans clinging on. The irony here is that wetlands are the best sediment stoppers we have. Wetlands trap the soil, that’s why they grow on the edges of rivers and lakes and why in some places they are becoming more abundant. As sediment stabilisers, wetlands contribute to the water quality of Lake Macquarie.

Wetlands also act as natural flood mitigation devices and foreshore protection. They slow the peaks flows and hold the water. These wet patches of paradise provide abundant food and shelter for a huge variety of animals. Wetlands, because they are a combination of wet and land mean that birds can nest and dine alfresco as they desire. Wetlands are some of the most biodiverse and productive ecosystems around, they contribute to the abundant wildlife we have in Lake Macquarie and they also have a role in preventing the foreshore from disappearing.

Wetlands have had a hard time in the past though. They have suffered from ‘reclamation’ for residential, commercial and recreational purposes. The Toronto Workers Club and the fields use to be a part of the local wetland system. Wetlands have suffered agricultural and industrial pollution and invasion by exotic species and mining, some of these impacts are now being addressed by the Coastal Wetlands Park proposal in eastern Lake Macquarie.

Wetlands continue to cop a bashing too. At Teralba they are being treated as dumping grounds by a local industry who thinks pushing mountains of dirt into a wetland is a good way to gain a few extra meters of space. Many wetlands are now severely stressed by the drought, you can see the high and dry not-so-wetland from the Five Island bridge that is feeling the heat.

The Greens recognise wetlands as a vital component of our environment and the policy identifies areas that we will work towards including

• action against land use which results in degradation of wetland areas such as grazing, stormwater pollution and nutrients from runoff and other sources;
• increasing the participation of local communities and community-based groups in wetlands management;
• education of the broader community about the important functions of wetlands;
• encouraging management and recovery plans for all degraded wetlands with funding to implement plans prepared under the NSW Wetlands Management Policy;