House of Assembly Fifty-Second Parliament, First Session (52-1) 52 1 Parliament of South Australia House of Assembly published Grievance Debate Stormwater Harvesting STORMWATER HARVESTING Mr WHETSTONE House of Assembly Chaffey Mr WHETSTONE (Chaffey) (15:24): I rise today on the subject of stormwater. Prior to the state election in 2010, the Labor government opposed the Liberal's sensible stormwater harvesting policy. Just in recent times, it has been back on the agenda through the media and through policy decisions, so stormwater harvesting needs to be looked at again. According to an article in The Advertiser on 4 April referring to a letter to the previous minister from the CSIRO and Dr Peter Dillon, stormwater requires only simple treatments to achieve drinking water standard. The question I ask is: did the taxpayer of South Australia know this? Today, we are looking at a 100-gigalitre desal plant at a cost of around $2.4 billion, which will include the north-south interconnector. That north-south interconnector, at a cost of around $403 million—$403 million for an interconnector—has been put in place for the extra 50 gigalitres in the desal plant. I wonder what sort of storage we could put, with that desal water, into an aquifer at a much-reduced cost. We have the expertise here in South Australia, we have the aquifers under Adelaide, but do we have the government's will? I suspect not. We hear that the plant will be used with renewable energy certificates or offsets. Where do those renewable certificates come from? I believe that is just smoke and mirrors. We look at Adelaide as a catchment; we look at the Murray-Darling Basin as a catchment. Dr Peter Dillon has explained that Adelaide, or cities, are highly effective catchments and Adelaide could yield 4,000 times more run-off per hectare than the Murray-Darling Basin. On an average year up to 180 gigalitres of stormwater flows out to sea, and there is potential for 250 gigalitres of this urban stormwater to be harvested, stored and recovered in one year in the three cities studied. So far that includes Adelaide, Perth and Melbourne, and the cost is less than the current mains water supplies. I wonder if the people of South Australia understand what the desal plant is going to cost them as opposed to what it would cost them to harvest stormwater? We called for a desal plant of 50 gigalitres; an affordable desal plant. What we needed to do was diversify away from the River Murray. What we are seeing is an ad hoc, kneejerk reaction, of putting in a 100-gigalitre desal plant at huge cost to the South Australian taxpayer. What we are also seeing is that the flow-on cost of that 100-gigalitre desal plant is the north-south interconnector pipe. That north-south interconnector pipe is going to use a huge amount of human resources at huge cost, at huge inconvenience, and I believe that it is an unnecessary exercise when we look at water coming out of the desal plant being pumped through a north-south interconnector to fill up reservoirs. At what evaporation rate? At what loss going into these reservoirs? Would the government consider pumping some of that desal water into underground aquifers, underground storage, where we don't see the evaporation or the losses and what we can see is that the water is stored, it is clean, it is kept green and it is safe under the ground. Again, I would like to bring this to the water minister's attention: does he want to continue taking water away from the food producers of this state and to save the Murray instead of looking for sensible solutions in his own backyard? The water minister, I believe, is a stormwater denier. The government has misled and condemned South Australians to paying billions of dollars for a desal plant that does not reduce the city's reliance on the River Murray. That is the crux of the reason that we put the desal plant in: to take the draw out of the River Murray, to give South Australia better water security, and yet this government continues to overlook an opportunity staring it in the face. We watch the water go out to sea. We watch that water destroying sea grasses. We watch that water having an impact on the fishing industry, having an impact on the environment, and yet we see marine parks trying to be introduced while we have up to 180 gigalitres of water running out into the gulf every year. Murray water, for Adelaide, is stormwater. It flows straight from the Riverland streets into the river when it rains. In actual fact, if we look at our rainwater tanks, those rainwater tanks are stormwater.