Community Wastewater Management System

Dr HARVEY (Newland) (15:48): I rise with great pleasure to speak about the government's commitment to a project that has already commenced to transfer over 4½ thousand households from the Tea Tree Gully council's ancient, archaic septic system across to modern, reliable SA Water sewerage. This is a very important project for our community in the north-east. We will be fixing a decades-old issue at no cost to the household. We are being very clear about that: we are transferring all properties right across, and it will be at no cost to the household.

Prior to becoming the local member, I lived in a part of Newland that was not on the old system, so I had normal SA Water sewerage—as most people assume they will have when they live in the metropolitan area. But I had heard the odd rumblings about septic tanks, which I thought was a little bit odd. My parents have one, but they live out north of Angle Vale, and everyone has one out there. I thought, 'This is odd. What are people talking about in areas like Fairview Park and Banksia Park about having septic tanks?' But it became very clear after being elected that this was a really big problem.

People had been struggling with these things. They were getting blocked up all the time, the fee was starting to increase dramatically and they were being told a lot of information about, 'This is why the fee has to go up. It's because of the Water Industry Act'—all this sort of thing—which turns out not to be true. Nonetheless, there was a lot of information floating around the place that people were not trusting. They had been paying a fee to the council for a system for decades believing that the system and the future of that system were being taken care of. There was someone out there who was planning for its future.

What has really enraged so many within the community is that it turns out that has not been the case. There has been no plan for its future, and it did not take very long for me to work out and to really see that rage. I can remember going to a community meeting at the Tea Tree Gully council where they had decided to set up a series of different stands where people on the system could go around and find out different bits of information. It very quickly turned into a very angry crowd asking questions of the council leadership. People were very angry.

From quite early on, I had conversations very quickly with the Minister for Environment and Water, the Premier, the Treasurer and anyone else who would want to hear about this important issue for people in the north-east. I was dumbfounded at how little interest anyone had paid this issue before. As time went on, we worked on it. This is obviously a very big commitment of tens of millions of dollars to fix what is ultimately a council asset and a council system.

I was thrilled when the state government decided that we would fix this decades-old system. The problems had gone beyond what was within the means and ability of the council to deal with on their own and, ultimately, SA Water would need to step in and fix it. This was fantastic. The community was thrilled. This is not about me, but a number of people in the community came to me and said, 'No-one has ever talked about this issue before. Everyone just pushes it under the carpet, hopes no-one notices, and now finally there is someone who is talking about it and advocating for us on this issue.'

I do welcome the Labor Party's new-found interest on this issue. They had 16 years and they did nothing. I was very curious to find out what sort of correspondence the former local member had with council on this. Had the council been lobbying that local member for state government intervention prior to us coming to government? I was really surprised when we did an FOI quite a number of years prior to coming to government that there was pretty much nothing. There was almost nothing.

Mr Whetstone: No interest?

Dr HARVEY: There was no interest. There was some correspondence on behalf of a constituent who had an issue with their tank, but there was essentially no interest from either side on that issue in terms of what we were able to get. I was really quite shocked. In any case, I do welcome that the Labor Party, who were in a position where they were unable to do anything, now suddenly do care about this issue. But we are very clear: we are committed to transferring all properties across. It will be at no cost.

I am extremely excited about this project. We have actually started, so it is not a case of just talking about it prior to an election and then hoping that people believe us, and then afterwards deciding what we are really going to do. We have already started. Households are already being connected. The full project will commence at the end of this year. Early next year will be stage 1. We will go to stage 2, we will go to stage 3 and, finally, after more than 60 years, we will fix a problem that has impacted so many thousands of households within my community in the north-east.