STORMWATER INITIATIVES

Mr HAMILTON-SMITH (Waite—Leader of the Opposition) (15:32): My question is again to the Treasurer.

Mr Koutsantonis interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Order!

The Hon. M.J. Atkinson interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Order, the Attorney!

Mr Koutsantonis interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Order! The member for West Torrens will come to order!

The Hon. M.J. Atkinson interjecting:

The SPEAKER: The Attorney, I have already called the house to order and called you to order.

Mr HAMILTON-SMITH: Does the Treasurer agree with the Minister for Water Security when she said on ABC Radio on 2 September 2008 (repeated a moment ago in her ministerial statement) that the government is 'committed to stormwater'? If so, how does he reconcile this with his comments on ABC news on 9 September (just yesterday)? When questioned on the proposal for capturing stormwater in wetlands and aquifers, the Treasurer said, 'We have discarded it for cost and practical reasons.' Who is telling the truth?

The Hon. K.O. FOLEY (Port Adelaide—Deputy Premier, Treasurer, Minister for Industry and Trade, Minister for Federal/State Relations) (15:33): We both are.

An honourable member interjecting:

The Hon. K.O. FOLEY: No, I need to expand. That press conference was about a report prepared by the Greens on stormwater—and a bit dodgy, I might add, because one of the authors of the report was a Green himself. Anyway, I will let others determine the veracity or the quality of the report when a Greens candidate in the last two elections was one of the authors. It argued that we should not proceed with a desalination project. We should scrap that and we should have wholesale stormwater capture and reuse, and that we could get the same amount of water from stormwater capture and reuse as we could from a desalination plant; that is, 50 gigs. At that press conference I said that we already have extensive stormwater programs—we know that. What I said was that capturing would not be the hard part. The hard part would be that it would be highly polluted; it would have a lot of heavy metals in it—

The Hon. P.F. Conlon: Gunny is nodding.

The Hon. K.O. FOLEY: Gunny knows what I am talking about. You would flow it into the acquifer as that is the only place you could store it, unless you want to build—I do not know—a massive great big tank. I think that is what the report said: you would stick it into the aquifer. Then you have to get it out.

The Hon. P.F. Conlon: And then you've got to clean it up.

The Hon. K.O. FOLEY: We are, and I said we have looked at a whole lot of things. We have looked at everything. One of them has been this question about how much water you can get out of the aquifer. The problem with getting water out of the aquifer—and I am sorry if I sound like a water expert; I am not and, if I say anything wrong, I am sorry, and the minister will correct it afterwards—but what I said—

The Hon. P.F. Conlon: Would you call it a B grade idea?

The Hon. K.O. FOLEY: No, it was an A grade idea. I do not call anything B grade any more.

An honourable member: It's what the Crows are doing.

The Hon. K.O. FOLEY: The chokers.

An honourable member: Mate, just leave it there now.

The Hon. K.O. FOLEY: Yes, I will get into more trouble. Extracting it from the aquifer is the issue. The advice we have is that you have to have the bores so far apart, about a kilometre apart, and it has to be in a grid system and you can only pull a certain amount of water out of one bore—it might be a couple of gigalitres, but not many gigalitres—he is not even listening to my answer—you would have to have a grid across Adelaide about 200 kilometres in either direction (give or take 100 kilometres, I do not know).

The Hon. P.F. Conlon: With pipes running down every street?

The Hon. K.O. FOLEY: Whatever—a long way. We would have pipes running up and down every damn street. It would be a financially silly thing to do and physically an impractical thing to do. That is not to say that stormwater reuse, to the extent that we can do it, is not a good thing, because it is—I acknowledge that—but I was responding to a question about wholesale replacement of the desalination project with stormwater.

Do you know who else was out there yesterday? The water spokesman, the member for MacKillop. Where is he? Where has Mitch gone? Mitch has gone. Gee, they are showing contempt of question time. Look at them: they are all out of place. Mr Speaker, even Mitch went on radio saying the Greens' idea was a silly idea, or words to that effect. I am probably not quite paraphrasing him, but he rejected it, and he said—

Mr Hamilton-Smith: No, he didn't. That is untrue.

The Hon. K.O. FOLEY: He did. He said desalination is the way to go.

Mr Hamilton-Smith: He said have both.

The Hon. K.O. FOLEY: The Greens were not talking about both. They were saying get rid of the desalination project and have wholesale stormwater reuse as an alternative. I have ruled it out and the member for MacKillop ruled it out. We are on the same page. There is nothing inconsistent with what I and the minister for water have said about this issue. It is just that I was talking about a broader issue in my capacity as Acting Premier.