Murray-Darling Basin Royal Commission

Mr WHETSTONE (Chaffey) (15:02): My question is to the Premier. Premier, will you ensure that the commissioner appointed to the South Australian royal commission has the expertise and understanding of the unique challenges faced by Riverland irrigators with the implementation of the Murray-Darling Basin Plan?

The Hon. J.W. WEATHERILL (Cheltenham—Premier, Minister for the Arts) (15:03): I appreciate the question the honourable member is asking, and I have some sympathy with his sentiment. He might just want to reflect for a moment on that if we chose somebody who was manifestly a South Australian partisan, and somebody who had a preconceived view about this matter, it may not achieve the benefit that we are seeking to achieve here. This is necessarily trying to achieve something from a minority position, something that I have a lot of experience in. What we need to do here is to bring the nation with us.

Ms Redmond interjecting:

The Hon. J.W. WEATHERILL: I notice the former leader of the opposition laughs as though that's a matter of some bemusement.

Mr PISONI: Point of order: the Premier addressed the member for Heysen by calling her 'the former leader of the opposition'. You have been very much a stickler about members addressing members in this chamber by their—

The SPEAKER: No, it's quite okay. As long as it is made clear that they are a former member, or as he or she then was, that is entirely in order. Premier.

The Hon. J.W. WEATHERILL: Obviously, the choice of the person should be a high-status jurist, somebody who could be regarded as, hopefully, a national figure that will have some influence, somebody that I think has a great forensic capacity to be able to undertake the detailed work that is necessary to get to the bottom of the water thefts that we have seen alleged concerning the upstream states.

With all due respect to my former profession, the high-level jurists that exist in the profession do have the capacity to assimilate complex information from areas of expertise that might be well outside their usual experience. So, of course, it is appropriate, I believe, that we choose somebody who is capable—

Mr Gardner: So it has to be a lawyer.

The Hon. J.W. WEATHERILL: No, it's best to be somebody that—

The SPEAKER: The member for Morialta is warned.

The Hon. J.W. WEATHERILL: It has to be somebody that complies with the Royal Commissions Act, of course, by definition, and somebody that can command the respect of the nation as they carry out this most important inquiry. I can see what the member is getting at there. His anxieties will be to make sure that we have somebody that isn't going to reach conclusions that are disadvantageous to South Australia, but I think we have to have confidence in the fact that the facts are on our side. Just as we saw with the Murray-Darling Basin advisory panel review of the operation of the Murray-Darling Basin Authority, where they concluded that our enforcement processes and compliance processes were nation leading, I think we must have confidence that we also will be found to have behaved appropriately in relation to the river.

Having said that, there may be—I doubt it—limited instances of misbehaviour on the South Australian side of the border. If that happens, the cards have to lie where they fall. It is something that we will have to grapple with, but I am quite confident that our irrigators have done the right thing—they always have. They have always understood the precarious position that they occupy at the end of the river, and so I have quite a lot of confidence in the South Australian irrigators.