Extreme Weather Conditions

Mr TRELOAR (Flinders) (15:33): It is the second time I have discussed my age in the house today. As I indicated earlier today, I am of middle age. I am 55 years old, and I am old enough to remember when we had the electricity line installed on the farm, and it was a great day. It was 1966, and up until then we had relied on 32-volt generation. My grandparents had a Dunlight and my father had a diesel generator with which to provide lighting and some household appliances with 32-volt power.

It was a great day when the 240-volt SWER line arrived. As I said, it was 1966. My grandparents were to be on a different SWER line. Theirs arrived some time later. We were very pleased as children that our grandparents gave our family a television for Christmas in 1966. We were able to have a television because we had the power on. What we did not know was that they were going come down every single night and watch it with us, but that was fine. My point is that here we are 50 years on and we have become so reliant upon electricity and a consistent, regular and adequate power supply that the event of the last few days has caused extensive upheaval.

Nobody can doubt that it was a significant storm event. It had significant impacts on the coastal regions around the state, particularly the Mid North of South Australia, in the countryside north of Adelaide, and took out any number of major transmission towers in our electricity transmission system. Of course, that meant that the entire state was out as of late yesterday. I note that Adelaide is back on but that most of the country areas of South Australia are still off. I have spoken today to constituents in Port Lincoln, Ceduna and other places in between. Here we are, 24 hours on, still with no power supply, so I can only imagine what they are going through and the tasks they are going through at the moment.

Amongst other things, we rely on electricity to supply household appliances and to provide refrigeration. These days, virtually all our businesses rely on electricity, and even our electorate offices are so reliant upon electricity to provide internet services, communication and so on. It is unfortunately the second time that this situation has arisen in this state in almost 12 months, with November last year and now, of course, September this year. In this chamber, I represent most of the people of Eyre Peninsula and just a month ago we were off power again as a result of storm damage. From time to time, we expect disruption, but we do not expect, nor can we manage, extended periods of power outages.

In fact, last time we were out for over 24 hours and some areas were out for 36 hours, and I am talking about the situation a month ago. Of all the concerns raised with me at that time, the most significant was the loss of mobile phone communication and, as a result of that, more particularly and more specifically, 000 emergency calls could not be made. You could say that we dodged a bullet last time because there were no essential emergencies that required that call to be made, to my knowledge, on Eyre Peninsula, but you do not know.

I know that it is a 21^st century problem, a First World problem, but our society expects those services to be available all the time and, if they are not, people look for someone to blame. My understanding, and the Premier articulated this earlier today, is that mobile phone towers have a battery backup. Unfortunately, the battery backup only lasts often for a period of about eight hours, so any power outage longer than about eight hours, and we are going through one now and we went through one on Eyre Peninsula a month ago, means that all the mobile phone towers run out of capacity, that we are no longer able to talk to each other and that we are no longer able to make those 000 calls.

It is a source of much frustration. I think we need answers. Certainly, our leader, Steven Marshall, has called today for an inquiry into the state's power system because the fact that power outages occur we recognise, but more significantly, and what we need to resolve, is the time taken to put all our residents, all our businesses and all our homes back on a regular and constant supply of electricity.