NATURAL RESOURCES MANAGEMENT (REVIEW) AMENDMENT BILL

Second Reading

Adjourned debate on second reading.

(Continued from 27 October 2010.)

Mr WILLIAMS (MacKillop—Deputy Leader of the Opposition) (17:33): As much as I would like to be brief, I suspect I will not be overly brief on this matter. It is a significant matter and there are significant issues in this bill. It is an area of our statutes that I have a great interest in, and have always had a great interest in, and I do not often get the opportunity to talk about things that I really enjoy talking about.

The Hon. P. Caica interjecting:

Mr WILLIAMS: As I have the minister as a captive audience, I might take the opportunity to talk at length on the matter. As to NRM legislation in this state, I have often held the view that we have put far too much emphasis on some parts of the administration of NRM here in South Australia, and to a significant extent I think we have got it wrong.

I want to put it into some historical context because the Water Resources Act 1996, the forerunner to the current NRM act, was probably the reason I came into this place in the first place back in 1997, along with the way the legislation had been enacted and then administered, particularly in the South-East. Since then the NRM Act 2004 picked up basically all of the old Water Resources Act of the mid-90s and some other pieces of legislation and rolled them into one to form what we now call the Natural Resources Management Act 2004 and the whole NRM industry.

In the first instance under the Water Resources Act we had advisory committees throughout the state, certainly in my part of the state in the South-East where water was a significant issue way back then. The Water Resources Act gave us the ability to prescribe areas, but we had already licensed some parts of the South-East, certainly in the Upper South-East around the Keith area, in the Tatiara, the Padthaway area and the Naracoorte ranges, and then we moved to licensing right across the Lower South-East at that time.

We were basically feeling our way a bit as to how we would go about that and how we would administer it, and then we introduced the Water Resources Act which in its original form picked up those water advisory committees but gave it the ability to set up water allocation boards. One of the first allocation boards, I think, established in this state was in the South-East and that, now with the more contemporary legislation, has been rolled into the local NRM board.

The original concept was to have the boards as a community-based authority, hopefully being used to collect together the thoughts and aspirations of the local community and developing policy and policy decisions around the wants and aspirations of the communities. I argued right from day one that I did not think that was possible to happen when the membership of the boards was responsible directly to the minister, rather than being directly to the community. So I have always argued and always thought that we would have a much more robust involvement of community if those boards, or at least a portion and hopefully at least half of the membership of those boards, was directly responsible to the community by direct election.

To my mind, that has always been a failure of the NRM system that we have adopted in this state. The board membership had absolute responsibility to the minister of the day, so they would just become another tool of the minister. It has been my experience—and I will not go through all the examples—in every instance that the boards would seek to understand what the minister of the day wanted before they would take a decision and they reflected the want of the minister rather than have a genuine consultation with their local community and reflect the want and aspirations of those local communities. It is a serious flaw in the system.

One of the other issues that I have always had significant problems with under this particular act is that we have basically formed another level of government because the NRM boards basically have taxing powers. Now we not only have federal government with its taxing powers, the state government with its taxing powers and policy-making fora, local councils with their taxing powers, we now have NRM boards with quite broad taxing powers. As I say, there is no direct representation from the people they tax. There is a serious breakdown of accountability between the taxed and the decision making around the way those taxes or, in this case NRM levies, are spent.

To my mind it always has been and remains a flawed system and one which, for as long as I am returned to this place by my constituency, is an argument I will continue to make. If we want a system where the minister has total control, where the executive government makes all the decisions through that minister and they have total control, let's have that system and let the minister wear the odium of raising the taxes and of making decisions. Let's get rid of this nonsense where we pretend we have an independent autonomous body that makes the decisions about policy and about taxing.

If we want a system where we have an autonomous independent body, let's remove those parts of the act that establish the boards and replace them with an open and freely elected body: we have to have one or the other. At the moment we have neither but rather a mish-mash in the middle, which to my mind does not really work. That is some of the background I wanted to put to the NRM Act as we see it today.

The manifestation of what I have been saying is that the NRM boards have failed miserably in the functions they are suppose to be undertaking on behalf of who knows whom—on behalf of the minister and the communities they are in. It is hard to even pinpoint who they should be taking these functions on board on behalf of because there is no direct accountability, particularly to the community.

With the bringing together of the various functions, particularly powers and functions that used to be held by the old soil boards and the animal and pest plant boards and bringing them in with the functions held under the old water act and forming NRM functions, it is fair to say that you could go to any rural community in South Australia today and you would quite quickly get a understanding that, particularly the functions with regard to animal and pest plant control, have fallen. The efficiencies of undertaking the functions in that area has dropped off so that the NRM boards seem to be very good at holding meetings, writing reports and doing those sort of things, and seem to be much less well adapted to getting on the ground work done.

In a previous life I served on an animal and pest plant board. I had the pleasure of serving on a board established when the state, in an enlightened moment, took away the powers of individual councils to run that function and forced them to create combined boards across council boundaries. I thought at the time that that worked extremely well. It worked well because, when one council was running its own animal and pest plant board, the experience was that that council did not really use the teeth that it had against its local constituency. When we had a combined board, where we had representatives from two or three councils, it was much more willing to be forceful on land owners to clean up their act with regard to pest plants and weed infestations, particularly rabbits. I thought that was a system that worked very well. There was agitation to combine, and I know that there was a select committee report of this parliament into combining the various functions that I have already talked about; and, after a time, that did in fact occur.

I think that the attack on pest plants and rabbits, in particular as a pest animal in this state, has fallen away under the NRM regime. I get a considerable number of complaints to my electorate office from constituents about the lack of direct action by the NRM boards and the officers of the NRM boards in this area. I never get a complaint from my constituency about the lack of action of an NRM board to wield a big stick particularly over water matters but over matters which my constituents think are of significantly less importance than the control of pest plants and vertebrate pests.

I will make no comments at all about the various efficiencies of the old soil boards and the new NRM boards in that area because the soil erosion is not something which has been an issue in the vast area of my constituency, certainly in my experience. I do know that some of my colleagues in further northerly parts of the state than that which I know and represent might be able to add something in that area. I do not have any knowledge of that, so I will not go there.

An honourable member: That's a change!

Mr WILLIAMS: I am absolutely delighted to learn that my colleagues over there are listening. For a moment I thought that they had all gone to sleep, which is not what I was trying to achieve, but someone over there is listening. That brings me to water and the way in which the water policy is administered in this state. This has been, obviously, as I alluded to in my opening remarks, a passion of mine, certainly in the time that I have been here and sometime before that.

Indeed, in a small period before I came in here I was a landholder elected member of the South-East Water Conservation and Drainage Board, so I have some experience of the South-East drainage system and, I think, a reasonable understanding of water policy and water management. I am an avid listener to talk-back radio in Adelaide, as I know the minister is.

The Hon. P. Caica: And an avid participant.

Mr WILLIAMS: I am an avid participant, too, minister—just like you are.

The Hon. P. Caica: I never ring in.

Mr WILLIAMS: You never ring in?

The Hon. P. Caica: No.

Mr WILLIAMS: Oh, minister!

The Hon. P. Caica: Of course I ring in, on invitation.

Mr WILLIAMS: No, minister. The minister interjects that he never rings in voluntarily. I find it hard to believe. I seem to recall getting a call on more than one occasion from a radio station in Adelaide asking me to comment on a particular issue and being told that the minister has declined an opportunity to speak on a certain matter. I just get into the topic at hand for a minute or two and the next thing the minister is on the phone. Now I don't know, maybe they just keep ringing you, minister.

The Hon. P. Caica interjecting:

Mr WILLIAMS: You will do your best.

The Hon. P. Caica interjecting:

Mr WILLIAMS: Well done, minister; you almost squirmed out of that one. The point is that, over recent weeks, Leon Byner on FIVEaa, in particular, has been having a bit of a field day regarding some complaints from people in the community about the way officers of the department have been approaching citizens regarding the administration of water policy.

The Hon. P. Caica: Are you going to give us some examples?

Mr WILLIAMS: One of my colleagues, I think, is going to give you significant examples, but I can tell you there are a number of examples where farmers have had armed police arrive on their properties in the company of water bureaucrats. I met with one of my farmers quite recently and why you would need to have an armed police presence to accompany a water policy bureaucrat on to his property, I do not know. I really do not know, but I may well give you that example.

The Hon. P. Caica: Well, I think you should after what you just said.

Mr WILLIAMS: I am just wondering whether I am going to get time to get to that tonight.

The Hon. P. Caica: We will do it tomorrow.

Mr WILLIAMS: I will certainly give the example tomorrow if I cannot get to it tonight. I think the Byner program made the point quite well that we are putting in considerable effort and using extreme powers for the administration of water policy, when you compare it with the effort, powers and the attitude taken, particularly by our courts, to transgressions in other areas of the law. He refers to things like drug pushers selling drugs, and some of these other criminal activities, where they seem to get off relatively lightly compared with some of the penalties that have been handed out under this particular legislation.

I happen to concur with the conclusion that he—and, I assume, a lot of his listeners who listen to and participate in that program, as the minister and I do quite regularly—has come to on his program. I think that is something that we should be cognisant of. I think we need to put the administration of water policy into perspective regarding the administration of other parts of the law. I think this piece of legislation has a tendency to go way over the top. We are now addressing this bill as a result of a review and I think this is one of the things we should consider as we are going through a series of amendments in response to a review of the way that this piece of legislation has operated since its inception in 2004.

I do not see anything in this bill that, in any way, shape or form, seeks to go down that path. I am not going to go through clause by clause in my second reading, but I certainly intend, in the third reading, to ask a series of questions of the minister on a significant number of clauses, but one of the clauses seeks to delete (I think it is section 72 of the principal act) the section which gives a citizen the right to remain silent if they believe that to do otherwise might incriminate them. I am not a lawyer, but to me it is one of the foundations of our legal system that you have a right to remain silent. In this legislation, we seek to take that right away.

Now, this is a piece of environmental legislation. This is not the criminal law: this is a piece of environmental legislation. I am making the point that I think, in the context of all our statutes, we have gotten a bit carried away with regard to this. I am not suggesting there are not people out there who are transgressing the law or that there are people out there who do not need to be dealt with; I am wondering whether we are dealing with them in a way and a manner that fits the crime. I think that is something that this parliament should seriously consider.

I think I have alluded to this but I have not actually said it in as many words: there is a statutory obligation under section 234 of the Natural Resources Management Act 2004 that has required the government to undertake a review of this legislation, and this bill is a result of that review. I understand that the review made considerably more recommendations than have been addressed in this piece of legislation but, notwithstanding, that is where the bill has come from.

With reference to the bill specifically, I am partly at fault here because I was in the chamber when the original bill went through and I do not recall making a comment along this particular line at that stage. However, it seems to me that, if we are going to put a statutory obligation to review the way a piece of law has performed four or five years down the track, we probably need the review to be more than just what I would call an internal review or a review by the department. We need some instrument such that the review is a bit wider than that, because this bill is all about making the principal act stronger, easier and better for the department to administer. I do acknowledge there are some, but I do not think it addresses too many of the issues that the community has raised about this piece of legislation since its enactment in 2004, presumably.

That is the first point I make, that maybe there should be some obligation in the review to do some quite broad public consultation outside of the department, outside of the NRM boards and that coterie of people who work closely with the NRM boards, in the wider community, and call for submissions from a broader cross-section of the community to have input into the way they see the administration of this act and where it might be improved.

I am sure Leon Byner would love to put a submission to the minister with regard to his thoughts. I did think that Leon Byner was quite unfair when he accused the Liberal Party of being asleep when the principal act went through the parliament. I did ring him up and point out to him that we moved something like 200-odd amendments to the legislation, and very few, if any, the government actually supported. I seek leave to continue my remarks.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.