Parliamentary Committees

ENVIRONMENT, RESOURCES AND DEVELOPMENT COMMITTEE: COASTAL DEVELOPMENT

Adjourned debate on motion of the Hon. R.P. Wortley:

That the 61^st report of the committee, on coastal development, be noted.

(Continued from 21 November 2007. Page 1487.)

The Hon. M. PARNELL (20:18): I rise to speak to the motion because it is a very important report that the government should take very seriously. It is the first major report to be completed in my time on the Environment, Resources and Development Committee. It did take us well over a year to pull together because we have done a very thorough job. The report consists of some 86 recommendations, all of which are supported by evidence that was presented to the committee, from experts in all manner of disciplines relevant to coastal management.

Whilst we are still awaiting the government's response to this report, out there in the community the report is already beginning to have an impact. One very brief piece of correspondence received by the committee was from Professor Sean Connell, Southern Seas Ecology Laboratories, at the School of Earth and Environmental Science, University of South Australia. He summed it up in very few words:

Dear Sue [Dr Sue Murray-Jones, researcher to the committee] and Philip [Philip Frensham, secretary to the committee], I just read your report. I think it was excellent. I hope it brings some productive changes.

And that pretty well sums up my views on this report as well. Another group that has taken a real interest in this report is the Friends of Gulf St Vincent, a group that members would be aware has been very vocal in the past few months, especially in relation to issues of nutrient and sediment pollution of Gulf St Vincent and the impact that has on our seagrass beds and other parts of the marine ecology. The Friends of Gulf St Vincent this Sunday has organised an all-day forum specifically to discuss this committee's report. I will read a sentence or two from the flyer advertising this seminar as follows:

There is increasing demand for development along our coastlines, which needs to be managed carefully to prevent further degradation. The issues of coastal development and the increasing demands by housing, industry, recreation and other users are interrelated and complex. There is increasing pressure on local communities who, as custodians, are keen to safeguard the uniqueness of their coastal environment.

The Friends of Gulf St Vincent coastal development forum will be held this Sunday, 2 March between 10am and 4.30pm at the Shores Function Complex, also known as the Woodshed, corner of Hamra and Military Roads, West Beach.

We often wonder, when we prepare these reports, whether they will ever see the light of day, whether anyone will read them or pay any attention to them, but the coastal development report of the ERD Committee is already creating waves out in the community. There are some 86 recommendations and, as tempting as it might be to go through each one in detail, I will spare the council that pleasure, although I am happy to discuss any one of them over a cup of tea with any honourable member at any time.

I will touch briefly on four sets of recommendations, four topics, just to highlight some of the important work this committee has done. The first recommendations I refer to are recommendations 5 and 6, which relate to the way our expert government bodies are able to respond to questions of coastal development. The particular body referred to in these recommendations is the Coast Protection Board. As members know, the Coast Protection Board is a referral body for development applications, which means that anyone who wants to develop anywhere along the coast must have their application referred to the Coast Protection Board. The recommendations are as follows:

5. The committee recommends that the government, as a matter of urgency, amend the development regulations to ensure the Coast Protection Board has power of direction for all development applications referred to it pursuant to schedule 8 of the development regulations.

6. The committee recommends that the government clarifies the role of the Coast Protection Board as a referral agency under the Development Act to ensure that the board's considerations, advice and direction extend beyond physical coast protection to include protection of habitat and wildlife.

Those recommendations might not sound terribly exciting, but they are born out of very poor practice in this state in relation to coastal development.

The way the system works is that all developments on the coast are referred to the Coast Protection Board, but the way the regulations are currently structured, the board only has the power to offer recommendations for the vast majority of those applications. For around 85 per cent of applications, the Coast Protection Board has no power to tell the relevant authority, usually a local council, what to do in relation to that application as it affects the coast. In only 15 per cent of applications does the Coast Protection Board have the power of direction. So, for the vast bulk of those applications, where it is an advisory power only, you would expect local councils to take very seriously the advice of the Coast Protection Board, yet the experience of the past several years has been that on average 20 per cent of the recommendations have been ignored.

That leads to situations such as those we have discussed in this chamber a number of times over the past two years. I have raised them, as has the Hon. Sandra Kanck, and they relate to coastal development at Scale Bay, Searcy Bay and Baird Bay—those remote areas on the west coast of our state where the Coast Protection Board, on the whole, has done the right thing. It has recommended to the councils not to allow these inappropriate developments in these locations. Yet because the development regulations do not provide for the Coast Protection Board to have a power of veto or a power of direction, if you like, its recommendations have been ignored and, as a result, inappropriate developments have been built.

Those of us who follow these issues would recall that less than a month ago we had reports of a sea eagle having been shot in that part of the west coast. It is not to say that it was shot by someone living in one of those developments but it goes to show that the remote wilderness coast with those few remaining populations of white-bellied sea eagle and osprey do not sit comfortably with increased housing development along that stretch of coast. The more people who move into that area, the greater the pressure on those birds. I think they are useful recommendations.

Let us give the Coast Protection Board some real teeth. I note that some groups like the Friends of Gulf St Vincent, which I mentioned before, had equally valid alternative recommendations to make, such as giving more power to the natural resource management boards to give direction over developments that will impact on the coast.

I turn now to recommendations 20 and 21. These relate to the important questions of development in the sea and major development status over developments affecting the coast. If we start with developments that affect the sea, the committee's recommendation 20 is that all development in the sea, including aquaculture, or on publicly owned coastal land, be categorised as category three for public notification purposes in order to better reflect the community's interest in the commons.

That is an issue that I have raised in this place time and again in the two years I have been here. The sea is not privately owned. The sea is our common heritage. It is our common responsibility. Yet the way the development system has been structured, we have industrial development—in particular, aquaculture—being given development approval in the commons with little or no public consultation. I have moved to disallow regulations on this topic in the past and I will continue to raise it because it is inappropriate for this government, or for any government, to privatise the commons. It is our common responsibility, and all development should be subject to rigorous public notification and the right of the owners of that resource to appeal against inappropriate decisions that are made. So, let us bring our marine environment back into the commons.

Recommendation 21 of the committee is that section 48E of the Development Act should be repealed or amended so as to enable breaches of process in relation to major developments to be remedied by the courts. Again, I am very pleased that the committee chose to make that recommendation. It is an issue on which I have been working for over 10 years. As we know, the major development process in this state is such that, once a declaration has been made, the privative clause, as it is known in the Development Act, protects all decision-making from all forms of judicial review.

It is one of the most undemocratic principles in the South Australian statute book. It is relevant to coastal development because all too often we see major project status being imposed on coastal development, be it marinas or tourist resorts or the like. So, the committee has seen fit to recommend that we should at least allow people who are aggrieved by poor process or illegal process to be able to remedy the situation in the courts. It is not advocating open slather merits appeals. It is saying that, if the government has behaved illegally, and if the government has not followed its own planning laws, it should be open to the courts to remedy that situation.

The third recommendation that I want to draw the council's attention to is recommendation 44, which states:

The committee recommends that the government mandates that immediate changes should be made to development plans to limit contributing activities where evidence is available to indicate that cumulative impacts have occurred, and that some environmental threshold has or will be breached.

At first glance members might not understand what that means, but it refers to that very simple concept that we all know called 'death by a thousand cuts.' We find that the cumulative impact of various forms of development has an impact on the environment that is usually not picked up when each development is assessed only on a case-by-case basis. So, it makes eminent sense.

I note that in her evidence to the committee Ms Bronwyn Halliday, the Chief Executive of Planning SA, agreed that there was a problem with those cumulative impacts. She said:

Unfortunately, with a lot of management and environmental issues there are ongoing issues, and it is often the incremental impact that has the greatest impact. It is very difficult to control incremental issues at a particular point in time. The Development Act has no powers to be retrospective, and it has very limited monitoring powers, if they are implemented at all, so it cannot deal with things over time very well.

Yet, what we find is that it is those incremental impacts that cause the most harm. The 5,000 or maybe 6,000 hectares of seagrasses we have lost off the Adelaide coastline in recent decades were not the result of one catastrophic pollution incident: they were the result of decades of diffuse pollution. Every person whose toilet was flushed, where the effluent ended up in one of our sewerage treatment works and where that effluent ultimately ended up in the Gulf, is partly responsible.

Every person whose property drains into the Sturt River or the Torrens River which then enters our marine environment as polluted stormwater is partly responsible, yet we have very few mechanisms—and certainly no mechanisms in the Development Act—that deal adequately with these cumulative impacts. So that, I think, is a very important recommendation, because we need to get beyond just focusing on the individual developments to our collective impact.

The final of the series of recommendations that I want to refer to are recommendations 82 through to 85 which relate to climate change. Recommendation 82 states:

The committee recommends that the government explicitly considers climate change and sea level rise in all aspects of planning, development and assessment.

It might be argued that the government has already thought about climate change, and we have some height restrictions in development on coastal areas, but I say it does not go far enough. Anyone who has looked at the science of climate change over the past 12 months would appreciate that it is a rapidly evolving science. We have had a number of reports, including the fourth report of the International Panel on Climate Change here in Australia, the interim report from Professor Ross Garnaut and the Stern report from the UK.

The theme that runs through these reports is that every time we look at the situation, it gets worse. If we look at the early IPCC reports, they show bands of possible sea level rise and, being a cautious bunch of scientists, they opted for a fairly conservative middle ground.

What we now find is that even scenarios that were regarded as extreme in the science couple of years ago are now being regarded as probably closer to the average. So, whilst we might have been talking about centimetres of sea level rise within the next hundred years or so, we are now starting again to talk about metres. Everyone would have seen pictures on television or in print of the impact of sea level rise on our coastal environment.

There is nothing more sobering than sitting next to a delegate from a Pacific island such as Kiribati at an international climate change conference and to look that person in the eye and say, 'We don't care about your country going underwater, because we're too wedded on coal. We're not prepared to cut our emissions.' In South Australia we need to make sure that the adaptation phase of our response to climate change must incorporate references to it at all levels in the development plan. There are just four of the recommendations out of the 86.

Just before I conclude, I again make reference to the Coastal Waters Study which was released just recently, and whilst that study did not form part of this committee's work, I think some very interesting lessons come from it. One of the lessons learnt from one of the people who spoke to our committee but who was also involved in the Coastal Waters Study was that it was a very useful approach to consider going to the beach, turning your back to the sea and then saying, 'We need to keep on land all this waste that we are generating.' I think that is the take-home message of the Coastal Waters Study.

We can no longer pump our effluent out to sea. We can no longer allow polluted stormwater to run out to sea without its being cleaned up first. That means that the planning system has to be responsive to these coastal impacts everywhere there is an impact. That means that every development in metropolitan Adelaide potentially has an impact on our Gulf St Vincent and our marine environment.

Finally, I put on the record my appreciation for the work of the committee. It was a long inquiry; it was a thorough inquiry. I especially want to give credit to Dr Sue Murray-Jones who was the principal researcher for the committee. She came to us from the Department for Environment and Heritage. She did a superb job in pulling together all the evidence from a diverse range of witnesses and helping us to incorporate that into the 86 recommendations.

I also thank the many witnesses and others who wrote submissions to the committee. We have tried in this report to do justice to all the things that were said to us and to incorporate as many of the ideas as we could. Without those people taking the time to write or to appear before the committee, we would not have been able to pull this report together. Now all that we await is the government's formal response. There are 86 recommendations. I am very keen to see the minister stand up in this place in the not too distant future saying that the government will support all 86 recommendations.

Debate adjourned on motion of Hon. Sandra Kanck.