Mawson Electorate

The Hon. L.W.K. BIGNELL (Mawson) (15:46): The people of McLaren Vale celebrated very loudly and very proudly last Thursday when the Environment Protection Authority came to the sensible decision not to allow the dumping of PFAS in the McLaren Vale wine region. Food, wine and tourism is worth $800 million to the McLaren Vale area. It employs thousands of people across hundreds of businesses, some small, some medium and some big. The threat to our area was one that led to a 10-month fight, from when an ad appeared in the small print in the local newspaper through to last Thursday.

I want to thank a few people in the house today. In particular, I want to thank David Gill, from Willunga, and Dudley Brown, who has Inkwell Wines and a lovely boutique hotel in McLaren Vale. Both of these gentlemen, by the way, were on our steering committee that brought in character preservation legislation a decade or so ago, which protects our wonderful area of McLaren Vale from urban sprawl. It means that the land that is devoted to agriculture in between McLaren Vale, McLaren Flat, Willunga and Aldinga cannot be built on with subdivisions. We are very proud of what we have achieved in the past, but we know to remain ever vigilant to the threats that could hit our local area.

Dudley contacted me about this ad in the paper in the middle of lockdown, in mid-April last year. We had just come off the terrible, devastating bushfires on Kangaroo Island and we had been trying to help people through COVID. When David and Dudley contacted me, I thought, 'Surely this isn't a fight that we have to have in 2020 to stop this deadly PFAS being dumped in one of the world's premium food and wine regions.' It was bad enough that people unwittingly put it all over parts of Australia where firefighting foam was sprayed, in places like RAAF bases not only here in South Australia but also in other states.

It was bad enough that they did that through ignorance, but to then scrape that off these RAAF bases from around Australia and bring it to a premium food and wine production area in my local area and dump all that was unconscionable. You could not believe that people would even contemplate doing it and yet that was the proposal. The EPA were saying, 'Well, there is a dump there already, so just something else in there couldn't hurt.' With all the language the EPA used for the past 10 months, it looked like they were likely to approve it.

They refused to hold a community meeting. It was left for me to do that and we had 348 people turn up to that meeting in October last year. The EPA blamed COVID. At the same time, in fact, in the same week that the Liberal Women's Council of South Australia could hold a meeting back in July for up to 600 people, the EPA was saying, 'We couldn't possibly have a meeting.' It turned out that the EPA actually wanted to divide and conquer. They wanted people in our local area to make an appointment to come along with the EPA and the proponent, Southern Waste ResourceCo, would sit there and tell these people how good PFAS was going to be for their local area.

The way our system works is that we are all elected in here—47 of us in this house, 22 in the other house—and we take our pay packets to do the right thing by the people who elect us. We are here to provide checks and balances to the bureaucracy, so if the bureaucracy is doing the wrong thing, like threatening to poison our local area, then it is up to us to step in. I had a quiet chat with the Premier during the last sitting week. We were just sitting over here and had a very cordial discussion. I said, 'You've got the chance here to step in and be a hero, to overrule the EPA and say that this is not the right thing.' The Premier said, 'I don't get involved in the decision-making. If I did that, I would never get any work done.'

It is everyone's responsibility who is elected in here to overrule bad decisions. The Premier could have got behind the bill that I brought in here in November last year, but every member of the Liberal Party voted against it. That bill would have banned the dumping of PFAS anywhere in the metropolitan area, within 50 kilometres of primary production land and within five kilometres of any town and city in South Australia. I think that is very sensible legislation to protect all of us in South Australia.

The Hon. V.A. CHAPMAN: Point of order: the member is now reflecting on a vote of the house. I ask that you bring him back to the substance of the speech.

The Hon. L.W.K. BIGNELL: You can live with the way you voted, Vickie.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Also, Attorney, the member for Mawson's time has expired, so he has taken his seat.