The café owner at Edithburgh gave me a wintry smile. We were on Yorke Peninsula to play a concert as part of the opening of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Walk from Coobowie to Edithburgh.

I’d just asked her if the algal bloom was affecting her business. “We’re open today, only because of you lot. Maybe tomorrow – just for coffee in the morning. After that we’ll have to close up again. It’s a nightmare. I don’t know what any of us are gonna do when you mob go home.”

South Australia is in the grip of an ecological disaster, the magnitude of which appears to have escaped most federal politicians and, indeed, the rest of Australia. It’s the South Australian equivalent of the 2022 floods in eastern Australia and the Black Summer bushfires in 2019-20.

Karenia mikimotoi blooms have turned South Australia’s beautiful blue waters into toxic soups, suffocating biodiversity and leaving communities, aquaculture operators and small businesses gasping for breath. Recovery is predicted to take years.

No one is suggesting that this harmful algal bloom can be easily dealt with. But it’s difficult to watch bureaucrats and government scientists adjusting their clipboards and handing out grants to each other to research and monitor the bloom rather than urgently exploring potential treatments.

The bloom was first identified by government agencies in mid-March. Since then, only one technology has been approved for trial: a bubble curtain spanning an area of about 200m x 100m designed to safeguard the cuttlefish nursery. If the algal bloom is detected nearby, land-based generators and compressors will pump air through underwater feeder lines and tubing creating what the government agencies fondly hope will be a protective bubble curtain.

Other than that, it appears the $28 million algal bloom fund is wholly devoted to a task force, community consultations and grants to research and monitor. It’s a big, beautiful, bureaucratic ballet in which the dancers wear lab coats, rather than life jackets.

Back in June a South Australian company advised the SA Government of its technology, comprising oxygen and ozone nanobubbles, already proven to be safe for vertebrates, invertebrates and vegetation. Each unit, about half the size of a fridge, pulls oxygen out of the atmosphere, concentrates it and combines it with ozone nanobubbles one micron across before defusing it quickly throughout the entire water body.

When monitored and calibrated dynamically, the ozone deals with Karenia, releasing oxygen into the water as a byproduct. The dissolved oxygen expedites environmental recovery and a return to balance. No chemicals are used (other than the ozone) and it uses little power comparatively – much less than the bubble curtain. It’s scalable, able to be monitored digitally in real time and can be deployed in enclosed and semi-enclosed water bodies. It’s also deployable in near-shore ocean environments like bays and oyster farms. In recent months it has effectively rehabilitated Wagga’s Lake Albert. It’s also been independently tested and used successfully in marine/aquaculture environments around the world against algal blooms, e-coli and other harmful bacteria. All this without any of the dire consequences so confidently predicted by government scientists and others.

Apparently, there is concern in some quarters that the technology might sanitise other bacteria as well – much like sanitising your hands militates against good bacteria as well as bad. (Personally, I’d much rather my surgeon sanitises his/her hands.) It’s a bit like using fire retardant on a catastrophic bushfire day. The retardant won’t do the iridescent Adelaide Hills jewel beetle much good, for instance, but without the retardant the bushfire’s going to kill absolutely everything anyway.

Meanwhile, the Malinauskas Government rolls out the prayer mats, waiting for a thunderclap of certainty.

I am not a scientist and I don’t claim to be one. But I do understand logic, epistemology and the scientific method. Whatever theoretical arguments might be raised against deploying an oxygen/ozone nanobubble technology, until it’s actually tested the arguments are precisely that: theoretical.

The government has known about this for almost three months and the company has extended many invitations to have the technology tested and monitored under whatever conditions government scientists want. The result? Endless questions which are quickly answered by the company, followed by a week or two of silence, followed by more “yeah, but…” questions. The chief executive has sent in enough correspondence, evidence and peer-reviewed literature to wallpaper the entirety of Parliament House. In fairness, a couple of ministers appreciate the urgency and have expressed an interest, but, I suspect, they are constrained by fear – and the bureaucracy, in the bowels of which the wheels don’t just grind to a halt: they fall off before being sent away for further review. It’s like thinking that drownings will be prevented by yet another review of water quality.

Rather than test the South Australian company’s technology, the government is now talking about smothering the blooms with clay particles. But that idea comes from overseas which sits much more comfortably with South Australia’s cargo-cult mentality.

For the record, I understand and fully support the scientists’ and bureaucrats’ insistence that any technology is not going to do more harm than good. We’re still dealing with cane toads, rabbits, foxes and blackberry bushes. No one is suggesting that we release the equivalent of plutonium in Rundle Mall. But when families and livelihoods are bleeding, and marine life is dying by the ton, there’s a difference between responsible risk management and terrified inertia.

Those with actual skin in the game — fishers, aquaculture leaseholders, tourism operators, surfers and the kids who once swam at the beaches — are watching their lifestyles and livelihoods erode while grant money is soaked up by taskforces, scientific studies and financial handouts equivalent to putting a Band-Aid on a compound fracture.

The cost of caution isn’t being paid by the policymakers; it’s being paid by the people who fund their salaries.

Ultimately, I don’t care what technologies are tested and deployed. Like most South Australians, I just want to see something actually tried. It’s time the talking stopped.

I am reminded of Morris West’s novel Lazarus in which one of the Vatican cardinals was reflecting on the stifling effects of the bureaucracy within the church. He said, memorably, “Bureaucrats are the accursed of God”. Quite.

(Disclosure: John Schumann worked pro bono for Hydro2050, the South Australia company with the oxygen/ozone technology, for six months. In recent weeks, he has been remunerated.)

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.