Power Outages

Mr TRELOAR (Flinders) (15:26): I rise today to talk about some correspondence I have undertaken with my constituency on the back of the significant power outage some three weeks ago. I took it upon myself to write to residents of Eyre Peninsula to seek their thoughts on the power outage and the impact that it had on them as residents and businesspeople of Eyre Peninsula.

I wrote a letter highlighting a couple of things in particular, such as the failure of the backup generators at Port Lincoln. I will come back to that shortly, but I do believe that, had they worked as designed, as intended and as contracted, the impact on Port Lincoln and the bottom part of Eyre Peninsula would not have been anywhere near as significant as it was. Of course, I recognise that the whole of Eyre Peninsula was off for a considerable period of time, but it need not have been as bad as it was.

I also made comment about the government's emergency response. You give credit where credit is due, and the government did set up two recovery centres, one at Port Lincoln and one at Ceduna, but it certainly seemed to be a little bit ad hoc, with nobody really knowing what was going on and what was available. Applications for $700 hardship grants were there to be filled out, and I am hearing that some people at least have been paid. I am not sure who makes the judgement about hardship or need but, anyway, there you go. I have not heard of anyone at this stage who has been refused, but I was interested to hear about the experiences of my constituents.

I put a survey form on the back of the letter and I asked four questions. The first one was: how did the outage affect your household or business? The opportunity is there for constituents to respond. My second question was: did you apply for the loss of power grant? A simple yes or no. Question 3 was: have you been able to find information about the blackout and subsequent relief easily? Question 4 was: what action needs to occur to ensure our future energy reliability? There is plenty of opportunity for people to put their thoughts down there.

Of course, apart from the power failure, the single biggest issue was the failure of the communication systems, and not just the mobile phone communication but also landlines were going out, so it was really difficult for any reliable and considered information to be put out to people. I know that people are very concerned about the lack of information. As a result of that, they were not easily able to find out about the government's recovery centres or the grants that were available. Also, there is a vast distance between Ceduna and Port Lincoln (some 400 kilometres), where there are not insignificant communities, and a vast number of people did not have the opportunity to travel to either Ceduna or Port Lincoln.

We are getting about 12 to 18 surveys a day being returned at the moment. Part of my grieve today is about giving this survey a plug. I encourage people to fill this out and return it. We are finding that most people are upset particularly about the fact that they lost food from the refrigerators, that there was no fuel available (the service stations were not able to provide petrol or diesel for transport) and that there was no phone communication.

Many people did not know or did not hear much about the relief grant and said that it should have been advertised better. People have suggested in their comments that we reopen the Port Augusta power station and make better use of current wind farms. We have two wind farms on Eyre Peninsula at the moment, one in the Cleve hills and one west of Port Lincoln, neither of which can be used to capacity because of the poor state of the transmission lines.

Other options included having a backup generator that actually works, getting a nuclear power plant, updating the powerlines and interconnectors and not relying on Victoria for power. Some interesting comments will come in, I have no doubt, but I thought it was important to give people the opportunity to tell me and us, this parliament, about their experiences and what they see as a solution. This situation has not been resolved yet, and it could occur again later this week, over the summer, or anytime soon. I am also quite sure that there will be a significant number of comments about the price of power.