CHARACTER PRESERVATION (MCLAREN VALE) BILL

Second Reading

Adjourned debate on second reading.

(Continued from 5 April 2012.)

The Hon. I.F. EVANS (Davenport) (16:30): The minister will be pleased to know I will not speak for long on this particular bill. It is essentially a rerun of the previous bill, but for the McLaren Vale district. In fairness to the Onkaparinga council, I think it is fair to say their position is a touch more lukewarm towards the proposal than the northern councils. A letter from the council, dated 4 May, sets out some concerns of the council which still need to be worked through. Just to briefly touch on some of those issues raised by the council, the letter states that:

...the bill removes an important statutory planning role for [the] Council by requiring the Development Assessment Commission...to be the relevant authority when a proposed development involves the division of land within the Character Preservation District. Our preference is that the Council retains this important governance role.

So, that is a matter for the Onkaparinga council. They also raise the issue of the character values of the district. They believe that 'they should be expanded to recognise some important environmental attributes of [the] ecosystem services provided within the district'. They also suggest some amendments to clause 6 to include the words:

(f) natural landscapes of high visual amenity and environmental significance.

The council raises the issue that:

...it remains unclear as to who will be responsible for reviewing the Development Plan—the Minister or the Council? If this is to be the responsibility of Council, it seems inconsistent that the Bill proposes that the Minister will be responsible for any subsequent amendment to the Development Plan (Schedule 1 Part 2 Clause 5(1)). This is also inconsistent with your statement to the House of Assembly—

that is, the minister's statement—

on 5 April 2012 which states, in part, that '...affected councils must review their development plans to align zoning policy with the special character of the district.'

The council also raises the issue that they believe:

...it is important that Council has an active role in both updating the Planning Strategy and ensuring the subsequent consistency of the Development Plan. We therefore seek some formal confirmation in the Bill that council will have a role and responsibilities in both...

I ask the minister, maybe in his second reading response, to confirm that is the case. The council continues:

While not specifically referred to in the Bill, [the council] are also of the view that the previous in-principle rights to construct a dwelling on an allotment—

this sounds like a familiar argument from the previous debate—

should continue to prevail within all zones contained within the McLaren Vale District, regardless of the size of the allotment.

I will ask the minister confirm that the landholders in the Barossa Valley district will be treated exactly the same as the landholders in the McLaren Vale district. As long as the minister answers those two particular questions as part of his second reading response, we will have no need to go into committee.

The opposition's position on this is the same on both bills: we are reserving our right until we see the formal responses from the councils. So, the minister's assertion area that we are opposed to the bill is actually wrong; we are simply reserving our right, at this point, until we see the final submissions from the councils, and then we will be able to lay our position out properly when the matter is debated in the upper house.

Mr BIGNELL (Mawson) (16:34): I rise, of course, to support this bill. It has been a long time coming and something that is very welcomed by the people of Mawson. I find it interesting that the opposition is waiting on what councils have to say rather than listening to the people and doing what is the will of people. If they actually got out a little bit more into the electorates and listened to people and found out what it was—I mean, it is no secret that the people of Mawson and the wider McLaren Vale area have been intent on getting preservation for our area. The people in the Barossa—

Members interjecting:

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: I remind members on my left that members on my left were heard without interruption. First of all, the member for Norwood, I do not think you actually sit there, if you want to be heard.

The Hon. I.F. Evans: If you can't hear him, you can't answer him.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Then he should not interrupt if he is not here then.

Mr BIGNELL: I will be making it very clear to the people of Mawson that members of the Liberal Party who are in here do not actually care about what it is that they have to say on this matter. They just care about some councils and the council staff. We heard it on the Barossa's—

The Hon. I.F. Evans: That's a lie.

Mr BIGNELL: Well, it's not a lie.

The Hon. I.F. Evans: That is a lie.

Mr BIGNELL: It is not a lie, because you have come in here and you have said that you will reserve—

The Hon. I.F. Evans interjecting:

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Member for Davenport, you are warned!

Mr BIGNELL: I have not heard, in any of your contributions you have made on either of these bills, you actually talk about the concerns of the public and the people. You have talked about the concerns of the councils.

The Hon. I.F. Evans: You won't release the submissions.

Mr BIGNELL: The submissions are available online, right?

Mr Marshall: They're not. Where are they available?

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Member for Norwood!

Mr BIGNELL: The submissions about these bills are available online—go online. My submission is on there, the McLaren Vale Grape, Wine and Tourism Association's is on there, Friends of Willunga Basin's is on there, Southern Coalition's. Just type in www.sa.gov.au and do a search and you will find that all of the submissions are there. So, to say that they are not there, and to just come in here and talk on behalf of councils in these areas, is just lazy politics. It is lazy politics and it is just shows that you are out of touch.

The Hon. I.F. Evans: 'Keep Lying Leon', they call him.

Mr BIGNELL: Mr Deputy Speaker—

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: I just draw to the attention of the member for Davenport that to accuse somebody of lying is unparliamentary, I have been advised by the Clerk. If it happens again, you will have to leave the chamber.

Mr BIGNELL: He also just referred to me as 'Big Lying Leon'. I'd ask for that to be—

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: I didn't hear that, so I will have to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Mr BIGNELL: Well, I would ask for it to be withdrawn.

The Hon. I.F. EVANS: What I actually said, Mr Deputy Speaker, is '"Keep Lying Leon", they call him.' That's what I said.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Who is 'They' call him'? Your colleagues?

The Hon. I.F. Evans: That might be true.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Alright. They are actually not allowed to say that, so they are unparliamentary as well.

The Hon. I.F. EVANS: Mr Deputy Speaker, if the member for Mawson is so offended, I will withdraw the remark, but he should not put things in the Hansard that are simply false when he knows they are false.

An honourable member interjecting:

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: That's right. Members actually have an opportunity to make a personal explanation. Member for Mawson, you can continue your comments, without interruption.

Mr BIGNELL: Yes, thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. As I said, it is actually a reflection of what the honourable member's contribution has been in this place on both bills today, and I will be making that very clear to the people of Mawson, because they actually really care. They care very much about this preservation bill, they are very keen for it and they have spent years trying to get to this point.

We can go back to Greg Trott, the great Wirra Wirra grapegrower and owner, and look at the sort of standards he set for his colleagues and for other wineries in the area to actually preserve the area. We saw all the vineyards at Reynella put under housing and put under shopping centres. We saw the vineyards and the dairies at Woodcroft disappear.

People in the area have had enough and, as I said in my speech about the Barossa Valley bill, they do not necessarily trust politicians or local councils. They want the parliament to have the say on how this preservation will work, and they want any move to change what we hopefully will bring into this place as legislation to come back to the 69 members in this place to be changed if, indeed, it is necessary for a change 20, 30 or 40 years from now.

Unless we bring in this legislation, any minister who holds the responsibilities that the current minister does will be able to change the lines on maps. That is why, when I went to the local community in 2009 and told them that we had preserved Bowering Hill, and no longer would it be sold off to developers for 6,000 houses, they said, 'Yes, that's great while you are the local member and'—as Paul Holloway was the minister—'it's fine while Paul Holloway is the minister, but what happens when we have a change of government or a change of minister? That new minister can just pick up the pen and change the lines or change the decision not to allow housing.'

What these people want is certainty. It is not just the locals down there, it is investors in the area. People want some security in their investments. If you own a hotel chain, for example, and you want to put a hotel in McLaren Vale, in 20 years' time you do not want to have that hotel no longer surrounded by vineyards but by housing. There is a lot of pressure from developers to dig up this beautiful land that we have, that produces so much great wine in McLaren Vale which goes all around the world. There is great pressure from developers. They want to get every greenfield site they possibly can, carve it up and sell it off in housing blocks.

I have been confronted by a developer who wanted to convince the government to carve off a bit of McLaren Vale, that is on the outskirts of the township of McLaren Vale. I was in the office and I was being sworn at, fingers were pointed at me and I was pretty much threatened to go in and allow this to happen. If we had allowed that to happen on the outskirts of McLaren Vale, then the next year we allowed a bit more development on the outskirts of Willunga, and then the next year a bit more in McLaren Vale, within a few years we would have no agricultural land between McLaren Vale and Willunga. The two towns would be joined up.

This takes away all that sort of pressure from developers. It gives certainty to locals. It gives certainty to investors in the area. As I have said, it can only be changed with the agreement of both houses of parliament. Whether in five years, 10 years or 20 years' time, the people of the Barossa Valley and the people of McLaren Vale will be keeping a very keen eye on what is going to happen, and I am sure that the views that are held now will still be held in decades to come.

It will be very important for groups like Friends of Willunga Basin, the Southern Coalition and the McLaren Vale Grape, Wine and Tourism Association to keep an eye on this. They know that the battle could flare up again in years to come if someone brings it before the house to change the law, but they are very pleased to see that we are introducing this bill. As I have said, they have worked very hard on this.

Dudley Brown of the McLaren Vale Grape, Wine and Tourism Association has been one of the main instigators of this move. We have been in negotiations going back to 2006-07. In 2009, Dudley came on board with Jim Hullick from the Southern Coalition and David Gill from the Friends of Willunga Basin and worked in a very positive way. Then we joined forces with the Barossa Valley and a group of four people up there, including Sam Holmes, the head of the Barossa Grape and Wine Association, Margaret Lehmann, Jan Angas and Anne Moroney. That group came in here and met with the Hon. Paul Holloway. This is going back to 2009. We had meetings in Parliament House, up in the Barossa and down in the south. This bill is not something that has just come up overnight; it is something that has evolved through the community.

When the minister announced in May last year that we were going to introduce these bills and he put out a discussion paper, I went to several meetings held by the McLaren Vale Grape, Wine and Tourism Association at Penny's Hill Winery where we would sit with the butcher's paper and say, 'What is it that we want for this area? What is it that needs protecting? What is it that we want to see encapsulated in this bill?' That was fed in. I did my own submission. I know the Southern Coalition did a submission. Friends of Willunga Basin did a submission. Lots of individuals did submissions.

I would say to the opposition: go through those submissions, see that the will of the people in the McLaren Vale area is for this type of legislation, and get on board. Do not wait and say, 'Well, we are going to wait and see what all the councils say.' I have to commend the Onkaparinga council, which has worked with this group that I have just discussed. I have sat down with Dudley Brown, Jim Hullick, David Gill and mayor Lorraine Rosenberg and the then CEO. We have had a couple of meetings with them over the years, and I know the minister had many more meetings with the mayor to work through the process in a quite sensible way to ask how it is that we can have legislation that will provide the protection that is required. This is the best that we could come up with.

People have mentioned to me that they are a little worried about their titles and having some of their proposals being judged as noncompliant. However, as the minister said, to be judged noncompliant is not to be judged that the development is prohibited. You can go through an added process, and that process is put in place to ensure that what is being proposed meets the very tight standards that will be put in place to stop our prime agricultural land being put under housing.

So far, six noncompliant development applications have been put up, and all six have been given the approval. The department is keeping a very close eye on things to make sure that things are being done properly and in accordance with what the vast majority of people in the south and in the McLaren Vale area would like to see.

People have become very angry over the years at decisions made by both levels of government, some recent and some made 30 or 40 years ago that have only just had an impact in more recent years, like the Seaford Heights subdivision. That land was rezoned and allowed for residential housing, but when it came time for the development to go ahead, the council was approached by the Land Management Corporation, which owned the land. The Land Management Corporation told the council that it had to be very sensitive to this parcel of land because it sits at the gateway of McLaren Vale. They suggested that the council put buffer zones on either side and shield housing from passing traffic on its way to the great tourism and wine region that McLaren Vale is.

Council decided to use the South Road part of that land for its bulky goods and industrial precinct, which is very ugly. We have 50 miles of South Road that does that; we do not need that in our prime tourism area. The effect of that was to push the houses up over onto Victor Harbor Road. So, we would have had both roads spoilt by the blight of industrial-sized buildings on one and the backyards of houses and Colorbond fences on the other. The state government was then required to step back in and fix that because of community angst.

The community is very sensitive to development that does not fit into the local area. It is one of the world's best wine regions and it overlooks the sea. We say that it is where the vines meet the sea, which is our catchcry in McLaren Vale. They would not meet the sea anymore if you allow 6,000 houses to be built on Bowering Hill. So, we stepped in and we stopped Bowering Hill, and we made Seaford Heights a more palatable proposition for the people. I appreciate that there are still some people who are not happy that Seaford Heights is being built. However, most people understand that that is the last subdivision that we will see thanks to this legislation that will protect 40,000 hectares of our area.

It was heartbreaking for many in the south to see the Onkaparinga council allow the site of John Reynell's original vineyard to go under housing a couple of years ago. This is where John Reynell, the founder of the wine industry in South Australia, planted his very first vines. Although the vines in there today obviously are not the same ones that he planted, it was still the site where he planted those lines. It is so important to the people in the south and it is so important to the wine industry, and now you drive past that site and there are two-year-old houses on there. We do not want to see any more crops like houses planted. We want to see some agricultural pursuit down there, whether it is vineyards, orchards or almond groves.

The people in the surrounding suburbs want that as well, because they are scared of South Australia becoming reliant on imported overseas fruit and vegetables. We have got prime agricultural land: let's not waste it and ruin it forever by building houses on it. The will of the people in Mawson, whether or not you listen to them, is for this bill to go through this house. Many say we have waited too long already and others are saying, 'Let's get it into the parliament and get it through as quickly as we can.'

I want to thank a few people. As I have mentioned before, Dudley Brown, originally from the United States, brought to my attention and that of many other people in McLaren Vale the Napa Valley protection legislation of 1968. He might have rubbed a few people up the wrong way over the years, as is Dudley's style, but we cannot take away from him and we must congratulate him for his tenacity and belief in the fact that McLaren Vale is worth saving and there has to be some way of saving it. So I take my hat off to Dudley for all the great work he has done.

I also acknowledge the wider association, the McLaren Grape, Wine and Tourism Association. David Gill and Richard Bennett from the Friends of Willunga Basin come with a different approach to the McLaren Grape, Wine and Tourism Association. Jim Hullick and Stephanie Johnston from the Southern Coalition, again, come with a different approach. These three groups came together with one common goal, and that is to preserve this beautiful part of the world.

I take my hat off to all those people and the other people who contributed through their own submissions or through the McLaren Vale Grape, Wine and Tourism Association, which was all aimed at protecting McLaren Vale—not only the beautiful area we have but also the economy in terms of the great wine that we make and sell throughout Australia and overseas. We also need to protect the area for tourists who come to our part of the state, whether they are from South Australia, other parts of Australia or, indeed, overseas. It is really important for those industries to be given the security that this bill provides so that they can make investments that they can be sure will be wise investments that will continue to pay dividends into the future. I support this bill.

The Hon. J.R. RAU (Enfield—Deputy Premier, Attorney-General, Minister for Planning, Minister for Business Services and Consumers) (16:52): I thank the member for Davenport for being succinct in his contribution and I will read his contribution with reference to both bills rather than simply what has been put in relation to this bill. I also thank the member for Mawson for his tireless advocacy for, in particular, his region, McLaren Vale, and also his great interest and support for the Barossa Valley.

Bill read a second time.

Third Reading

The Hon. J.R. RAU (Enfield—Deputy Premier, Attorney-General, Minister for Planning, Minister for Business Services and Consumers) (15:53): I move:

That this bill be now read a third time.

Bill read a third time and passed.