Grievance Debate

STORMWATER INITIATIVES

Mr WILLIAMS (MacKillop) (15:45): How delightful it is to have the opportunity to speak about stormwater after the Minister for Water Security refused to answer my question, principally because she could not answer it. My question was: what specific investments has this government made since 2002 into stormwater capture, harvesting, aquifer storage and reuse? Of course, the government has failed, and failed miserably, because it has invested very little.

Every time the minister stands up, whether it be in a public forum or in this place, she takes great delight in suggesting that our policy from the 2006 election was a policy to have a policy. I have great delight in coming back to the minister and saying, 'We have released a number of policies since that time. We have recognised that we are in a drought, and we have recognised that water security is probably the most important thing for South Australia in this period, and we are not about running around making silly little glib statements like she does.'

I will read from the minister's website that I downloaded just before question time this afternoon. The website states that it is estimated that by 2025 we will be able to increase rainwater and stormwater use to about 20,000 megalitres per annum. It is important to note that, when the minister, like all the ministers in this government, uses the word 'we', she is actually talking about 'they'—'they' being people such as the Salisbury council, because the Salisbury council expects to capture and recycle 20 gigalitres of stormwater by 2010.

So, the target the government has for 2025 will already be met by the Salisbury council within two years. Again, I remind the house that the minister loves to use the royal 'we'. She is doing nothing, but she will claim the benefit and the kudos for the work that is being done by others.

Let me just repeat what Tony Zappia said about the Rann Labor government and stormwater harvesting, that is, that it is taking the cheap option. What is the cheap option? The cheap option is to spend money on flood mitigation, get the water into a concrete channel and run it down to the sea as quickly as possible. There is another reason we believe we should be harvesting stormwater. The minister probably does not realise that a few months ago the Adelaide Coastal Water Study was released, and that highlights and documents something we have known for a very long time, that is, that stormwater released into the Gulf St Vincent is one of the causes of the degradation of the seagrass beds off our coast—some 5,000 hectares of that has died.

The consequence of that is that we spend millions of dollars a year shifting sand up and down our beaches. That is just one of the consequences of not capturing, harvesting and injecting stormwater into the aquifers under the city for future use. We believe that something like almost 90 gigalitres of water, which is getting towards half of Adelaide's annual water use, can be captured from our stormwater run-off, cleaned up through natural reed bed filters, like the one the Salisbury council has constructed out at the Parafield Airport, and injected into deep aquifers under the city. Instead of building a new dam at Mount Bold for over $1 billion, we are blessed with huge aquifers under this city, and they can be used. The Salisbury council has proved that you can pump water into these aquifers and extract it at a later date.

A four-year study by Peter Dillon and his colleagues at the CSIRO, down at the Waite, has proved that this water is eminently suitable for potable use and eminently suitable, following chlorination, to be put directly into our water delivery system. So, here we have a system we believe would obviate the need to spend over $1 billion reconstructing the Mount Bold reservoir, over the $304 million that has been earmarked to build a north-south pipeline to connect the northern and southern parts of our distribution networks, because we would have new storages right across the metropolitan area—storages that would be replenished every time it rained.

Even if we had a thunderstorm in the summer, we would get run-off. Because of the urbanisation and the hard surfaces, we get instant run-off from the city and the metropolitan area, and that water can be harvested, put into the aquifers and reused. But this government is very long on rhetoric, very long on the glossy brochure, but very short on action.