NATURAL RESOURCES COMMITTEE: ANNUAL REPORT

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

That the report of the committee 2007-08 be noted.

(Continued from 15 October 2008. Page 309.)

The Hon. C.V. SCHAEFER (17:06): I rise to very briefly support the words of the Hon. Russell Wortley. I, too, serve on the Natural Resources Committee. This is the committee's annual report. I think it is, by far, the most cooperative standing committee that I have served on in this parliament. Every issue that we have looked at, I think, has been looked at without party political bias and, although we do not always agree, we have always managed to reach a compromise decision. I believe that, if all committees worked in the same way, we would be getting much closer to the original idea of conducting standing committees within the British parliamentary system and the concept thereof.

I want to publicly thank our two staff members, Knut Cudarans and Patrick Dupont, our research officer, both of whom have done a great job. Patrick, in particular, has written some excellent reports for us. We are beginning to gain a reputation as a widely travelled committee. Given that one of our watching briefs is the River Murray, we have taken the time to travel across the extent of the Murray-Darling Basin (we have one more section to go), and I think that has given us a more balanced view of some of the problems that exist from one end of the Murray-Darling Basin to the other, and I will address this issue when I speak on the water bill tonight.

The over-simplification that the South Australian press and, indeed, many of our members of parliament have chosen to run with does them no great honour, in my view. I think that our committee, in its watching brief, has done an excellent job, and the committee intends working towards a better understanding of the whole Murray-Darling Basin system and, of course, how that then affects our state in particular.

I thank my other committee members for their participation. As I have said, it is a very hardworking committee. We meet virtually every week, and we have travelled extensively. We are very ably chaired by the Mr John Rau. We also have the watching brief over the natural resources management boards and their budgets. There is quite a lot of work to do in assessing the work of those boards, and we have been very pleased with their work. Many times we have been astonished by the size of the budget they appear to require to set up yet another mini bureaucracy. Both times we have reported that without fear or favour in a non-partisan way. I commend the report.

Motion carried.