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House of Assembly - Fifty-First Parliament, Second Session (51-2)
2007-11-15 Daily Xml
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MURRAY-DARLING BASIN

Mr HANNA (Mitchell) (15:30): I was inspired this morning when I attended a meeting of the Natural Resources Committee of the parliament. Professor Peter Cullen addressed the committee. He is a great thinker in relation to water issues in Australia. He was particularly addressing issues surrounding the Murray-Darling Basin. Professor Cullen made the statement that Adelaide is facing a real water scarcity, which is of particular concern to people in my own little patch of earth down in the Marion/Reynella area. What we have seen in terms of garden restrictions so far is nothing compared to what we potentially face if the drought continues and if inadequate measures are taken to address it.

I note that salinity testing is regularly done at Morgan on the River Murray and, as I understand it, salinity there has doubled in the last six months. If this continues, the quality of water reaching Adelaide from the Murray will be getting near to being too salty to drink, and we will be in diabolical strife. Our storage is down—and I am not talking about all the dams and lakes along the River Murray; they are in trouble, but the dams that supply Adelaide residents with water also are down. So, we do not have any fallback position at the moment.

The government has committed to looking at a desalination plant. If we need one, will we get one quickly enough? I have stressed the need for even more rebates for water devices, including rainwater tanks, so as to reduce demand from external supplies; in other words, to capture the rainwater, which we will get at least some of the time.

The other issue that Professor Cullen raised for Adelaide is the use of groundwater. At the moment, we use some of our groundwater for parks and that sort of thing. The future will probably bring the use of groundwater for domestic purposes as well. I note the brilliant scheme for the St Elizabeth's Anglican Church car park at Oaklands Park, in my electorate, whereby groundwater is used for watering, taking pressure off the water that comes out of the taps.

I note that there is much more that we can do in terms of lowering water demand. Queensland, in the closest comparison, still has about three times less water used per person in the urban environment than in Adelaide. So, even though we have taken some steps to reduce water use in South Australia, we have a long way to go. Rebates for rainwater devices, and so on, will help.

Even more important is a radical reform of water pricing. I have been calling for this for some time. The government needs to take control of the water pricing policy of SA Water. Whether it should ever have been privatised is a moot point now. The government can, and should, control water pricing, remove the supply charge, which forms the bulk of my water bill and the water bill of many Adelaide residents, and make it more of a user-pays system with a direct relationship to the amount of water used, and we will find people policing themselves. We will not need extra inspectors going up and down the streets looking at the garden hose; we will have people policing themselves and reducing what they use in the shower, the kitchen and the toilet, because it will cost them too much: it will cost them hundreds of dollars extra per year, if we have an appropriate pricing policy.

This same principle needs to be adopted across the whole of the Murray-Darling Basin. We need, first of all, an appropriate water register. In fact, I would go a step further and say that we need something like a Murray-Darling water bank, so that we have a facility for buying entitlements and water off irrigators up and down the river, to be used for environmental purposes to the extent that it is considered necessary by an independent judgment, and to facilitate trading of water entitlements up and down the river. The market will then tend to move people into more productive and efficient uses of water when it comes to considering crops.

The state government cannot do it all by itself, but it can take further initiatives—even if we have to adopt the Victorian water register and blend with it, for a start. Even if we can cannot do it nationally, we can do our bit.

Time expired.

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