Coober Pedy Community

Mr HUGHES (Giles) (15:21): I rise today to talk about the community of Coober Pedy in the Far North of the state, a genuinely unique community, and that is no exaggeration. It is a community with its own very particular challenges, and those challenges especially apply when it comes to the provision of essential services.

I will give a little bit of a potted history of Coober Pedy as an opal mining community. Once upon a time, it had a progress association and it relied upon a lot of voluntary effort. The community had a different dynamic in those days. It evolved into a fully elected council that was in place for many years but, unfortunately, a whole raft of issues accumulated for that particular council to the point where the previous government dismissed the council. That had my support. It was a process that started under a Labor government.

I guess I somewhat pre-empted the process on ABC radio, when I said that the council in Coober Pedy should be sacked. Two weeks later, I was up in Coober Pedy meeting the council, a very long meeting, but in some ways a worthwhile meeting. It is not that I was not without some sympathy for the council and the challenges they faced, with revolving door senior officers, revolving door mayors and a very small population from which to draw council members. The council had its issues.

Making all this far worse was the fact that this was the only council in the state, the only council of its size in the state, that was expected to provide the water supply and treatment process. It had to run that process itself at its own expense. People in Coober Pedy had to pay three times more for their water than elsewhere in regional South Australia or the metropolitan area. At the moment, they no longer have the generators—that has been outsourced—but they do have a distribution and retail system.

For a community of this nature, for a council of this nature, to sustain these particular essential services is just not possible. Coober Pedy will not be able to resolve this issue without state government support of one sort or another.

I have publicly advocated for SA Water to take over the water supply and treatment in Coober Pedy. SA Water provide that service in every other regional community. I have also argued, on the basis of equity, that the people in Coober Pedy should pay the same price for water as other people in regional South Australia and the metropolitan area. There will be a cost associated with all that, but it is about us all being South Australians and, when it comes to essential services, all being treated in an equitable fashion.

The debt level that the Coober Pedy council has is somewhere between $9 million and $10 million. They are not going to be able to resolve that; they do not have the rate base in Coober Pedy. It is a socio-economically deprived community. As I said, it is a remote community—a community with a whole series of challenges.

We have to shrink the council down to basic municipal services. They should not be shouldering the burden for water supply and they should not be shouldering the burden for electricity distribution and retail, and they have demonstrated over the years that they do not have the capacity to shoulder that burden, so we do need intervention.

We might well find that we get to a point, if we do not intervene in what is an important community in our Far North, where people there might well walk away from the utilities that are needed. The previous government put the administrator in and then just left him to hang out and dry. Intervention is needed.