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

Mr PENGILLY (Finniss) (12:29): I move:

That this house condemns the state government for its environmental treatment of the Lower Lakes of the River Murray and the subsequent effect on communities living around those lakes.

Water, water, water—or, more to the point, the lack of water, and specifically in this case the enormous environmental consequences of what are indeed the social and economic consequences of what is happening on the lower lakes and the lower reaches of the River Murray, part of which is contained within my electorate, and I talk specifically about Goolwa, Hindmarsh Island and Currency Creek. Also, of course, the member for Hammond has part of the lakes and, indeed, the member for MacKillop has some as well.

At this morning's hearing of the Natural Resources Committee, Professor Peter Cullen made specific comment about the devastating effect that is being felt in the Coorong and the Lower Lakes. He said that it may already be too late to save the Coorong. This is an absolute tragedy. The Lower Lakes and the Coorong are so environmentally important to the Murray and they are economically important to the people who live and work in the area.

What has been concerning me for some time—and the opposition has asked questions (to which we have not received satisfactory answers from the Minister for the River Murray)—are the barrages. They are leaking quite severely. The minister has informed me that the government has attempted to fix them, but people on Hindmarsh Island who have a close interest in the activities surrounding the barrages are telling me that they are just a disaster, quite frankly. They are leaking huge amounts of seawater back into the lakes and salinity in the lakes is rising rapidly.

According to Professor Peter Cullen, there will be an enormous die-off of fish the length and breadth of the Murray very soon. I do not want to talk disaster, but, unfortunately, it is about time we faced the reality of what is happening down there. Henry Jones, one of the longstanding fishermen who fishes the lakes, has an incredible wealth of knowledge about the lakes. Gary Hera-Singh is also a fisherman of longstanding. These people have an innate knowledge of the lakes and they are able to give a long-time history and tell us about what is going on down there.

Salinity in the lakes and the movement of the water is causing environmental concern to many people. It is bizarre that one can sit on one of the jetties in Goolwa and catch mullet. That will have a devastating effect. We built these barrages around 1930, specifically to create economic activity. Man changed the environment of the Lower Lakes. Now, as a result of the drought and the lack of water, the freshwater lakes and the whole environmental ecology built up around those lakes, including the incredible bird and fish life, is now under severe stress. Undoubtedly, it will rain again but whether the environment and the ecology has changed forever and a day remains to be seen.

Indeed, my colleague the member for Frome—a former premier of this state—did comment to me some time ago that he thought that, if the barrages did open and seawater did enter in any large amount, it would take 20 to 25 years for the situation to be remedied when the flows recommence. I say to members of both houses that, if they want an insightful trip across the barrages, they should do it. There is no-one better suited to show the way in which things work down there than Mr Phil Hollow who works for the Department for Environment and Heritage. He works at Wyndgate and he knows the area intimately. It is fascinating to do that, and perhaps the Natural Resources Committee of the parliament may see fit to do a trip down there, go across the barrages and travel to Meningie to look at the fascinating array of fish and bird life.

There is no question in my mind that the state government has failed dismally to maintain the water flows into the lakes and, indeed, has failed to deal with the problem of the Coorong, and so on. I believe that what is happening is tantamount to a criminal act. Quite frankly, the Rann government deserves condemnation for allowing this situation to occur to the extent that it has.

Just recently we experienced extremely strong winds from the south-west, and the water all but disappeared from around Goolwa, apart from in the deeper reaches. Many boats were grounded. This will be a consequence of where we are at currently with respect to the lack of water there. Of course, that will have a subsequent effect on the environment and the ecology—the fish, the birds and everything else—not to mention the effect that it is having on the economy and the people who live and work around those lakes.

Some places in that area at Langhorne Creek and Currency Creek have had enormous amounts of money put into them, and industries have developed that have changed the way in which people work and play; and, indeed, they have changed the environment. With respect to the water in Langhorne Creek, on Tuesday I was talking to Lucy Wilson from Bremerton Wines. She seems to think that this year they will probably get a vintage, because they have had nearly four inches of rain over the last two or three weeks, and that will probably get them through. However, they cannot irrigate out of the lakes, because the water is saline. I am led to believe that last year the sodium levels in the grapes were so high that they were almost borderline with respect to exporting the wine. It is just fortunate that we have received the amount of rain that we have in that area, because it will assist that industry.

Environmentally, the situation is now bordering on a disaster. I do not know how the Premier and the Minister for the River Murray can sleep at night. Also, I do not know how members of the Labor Party and the government can sit there and not rise to talk on the Murray and the disaster that is being perpetrated in that regard by the lack of action of the state government to do something about supplying alternative water sources for Adelaide and making provision to allow at least some flow to come down into those lakes to maintain the environment and the ecology of that area. As I said, I think it is a criminal act, and it concerns me greatly.

I know that my constituents who live around the bottom ends of the lake are in despair. They contact me regularly. I have held public meetings in Goolwa about the matter, and these people have raised their grave concerns. Some very active and keen environmentalists who live in my electorate have followed what is going on down there with great interest, and they are extremely sad about what is happening. So much of this could have been avoided if a few people had got their act into gear and done something about it earlier on. Here we are, five years down the track—we have had five years of drought—and we still have no alternatives with respect to the water supply for Adelaide.

We will, no doubt, get bells and whistles announcements in some way, shape or form. We will have good news announcements from the Premier, and perhaps one of these days we may have a desalination plant built (and I have spoken before about that). Building a desalination plant and taking the pressure off the Murray and allowing water to flow down the Murray back into the lakes system and into the Coorong would do such enormous environmental good for the area that it defies comprehension; and it beggars belief that this government has allowed the current situation to go further than natural causes would have allowed it to go. Natural causes is one thing. We cannot do anything about drought, it is a part of the Australian environment. It always has been and it always will be.

We will have good years and bad years, and we just have to live with that. That is just a way of life. Unfortunately, we have this situation in South Australia at the moment. We have always lived with drought. We live with wet years and good years, and it is called an average. However, the irrigators have never not had water, and this is the problem. They have built their economies and environments around the fact that they have always had this water. So, now they are in despair over their own businesses, their families and their lives.

They are in despair over the environment of the lakes, the lake system and the Murray. The Natural Resources Committee of the parliament is a good committee. It puts up good recommendations which are poo-pooed by the minister in another a place, and that concerns me. It is a good, active committee, which looks across a broad spectrum of the parliamentary process. I was most interested to see Peter Cullen at that committee this morning and have the opportunity to listen to him.

I would like to see the committee visit the lakes. I will arrange the day. The committee should just see what is happening environmentally and ecologically in those lakes. It is absolutely critical. If other members of the parliament were able to go down with them—make it a day out, just see what is happening, talk to people and look at the effects—I am sure that the members of the government who are sitting in the second and third rows particularly may start prompting the cabinet to do something more about getting on with trying to heal and fix up some of the damage that is happening in the Murray, and particularly in the lower lakes.

I hope that my motion will be supported. Again, I condemn the government for its lack of action, and I look forward to hearing other speakers.

Dr McFETRIDGE (Morphett) (12:42): I will not keep the house long, but I do rise to support this motion most firmly. The first major conference I attended as a member of parliament in 2002 was the Australian National Conference on Large Dams.

Members interjecting:

Dr McFETRIDGE: That conference was held at the Stamford Grand down at the bay. One of the keynote speakers spoke on the health of the River Murray, and he said, 'It's not a river: it is a series of long lakes.' It has been very poorly managed over many years and now we are more than paying for that mismanagement, and we are continuing to see mismanagement under this government. I speak on this motion because, about 10 years ago, my family had a farm at Wellington. We owned a lot of property just south of Wellington.

We had about the last four kilometres of the river on our eastern boundary and we had the top of the lake on the western boundary. We had one of the last private flood irrigation allotments on the river. Unfortunately, the licence had been sold off up river. It had been sold off to some almond growers in Waikerie, I believe. This land, which was actually on the southern end, was about one metre below sea level and on the northern end about .6 of a metre below sea level.

The salt accumulation there was really quite an amazing disaster to see. Fortunately, we were able to recover with some salt-tolerant crops, and we grazed it quite heavily before that with cattle. We were able to restore it to not quite pristine condition but, certainly, it was a much better block than when we first went onto it. The highland irrigation licence had also been sold off, and so the sand, because of the treatment it had received, was drifting badly. We were able to rehabilitate some of that.

This is just a reflection of what happens to properties around there if the water is taken off them and if they are not managed properly. A mention was made by the member for Finniss about the movement of water down there. We had levees around the lake and the river on the flood irrigation side that were about 2.5 to 3 metres above the normal lake-pool level when no wind was blowing. When the south-westerlies came in you could see that lake rise nearly to the top of those levees. It would rise over two metres on the Wellington side of the lake, and you would have boats on their keels at Goolwa—and that was when the lake was about a metre lower. I think it is about 0.6 of a metre now. It is a disaster waiting to happen. It needs to be managed. The only person who will be able to manage that is someone who is much higher qualified and much more powerful than anyone in this place.

I visited the area a few weeks ago. I went to see what the lake was doing and to look at where we had the farm just to compare and contrast it with now and refresh my memory. I went to Milang and Clayton. I spoke to a few locals at Clayton. They were very concerned. I was alarmed to see the level of the lake. We had been looking at buying a property between Milang and Clayton. It had 380 acres of leasehold on the lakeside, which flooded sometimes, but it is as dry as a bone now. Remembering the condition of the property we used to own at Wellington and comparing it with now, it is as plain as the nose on my face that it is a disaster waiting to happen, with the lake dropping as we speak.

We all know that there is a huge evaporation rate from that lake. As the shadow minister for transport, I went to look at the ferries. The thing that alarmed me was that the approach and the departure from the ferries are very steep. In fact, while we were waiting on the Adelaide side to go across, a bus driver on the other side had been instructed to turn around because the bus could not get on to the ferry. When I drove our sedan onto the ferry, it was much steeper than I remembered and the departure was also much steeper.

I spoke to a truckie from Milang not long ago, as he was departing the ferry at Wellington. His truck had a tri-axle back and, because the load shifted to the very back axle, some of the springs broke. He was of the belief that it will not be very long before the ferry at Wellington will be out of action for heavy vehicles and, in my opinion, it may be out of the action for even smaller vehicles unless something is done about the approach and departure ramps.

We crossed the river using the ferry at Jervois and the situation was exactly the same because obviously it is all part of the same pool. I hope the Department of Transport is doing something about this. I hope it is monitoring it. The traffic volumes are not huge, but they are vital to the local community at Jervois if they have to drive to Murray Bridge. For instance, if they had business in Tailem Bend, they would have to use the Swanport Bridge, which is a fair trek for them. Certainly, if you are one of the property owners on the western side of the river in the Langhorne Creek area having to truck all your freight and produce across to the Eastern States or receive goods, it will be much more expensive than it ever was—and there is already a lot of hardship in the area.

The dairy communities are obviously suffering very badly. I have friends with dairies down there. They are considering selling up. I think there are about 20,000 dairy cows between Mannum and the lakes. Many of those dairy cows have already gone, as a result of some of the structural changes to the swamps—and it is a good thing that the swamps have been changed. It is a pity that the dairies have suffered so much. With this impending issue of the lake continuing to drop, then we will have to deal with a further crisis.

What is the solution? I do not have an immediate answer to that because I do not have the technical knowledge to manage that, but I do know that we cannot fill up a dam four times the size of Mount Bold by sucking more water out the Murray. That is not the answer to it. I think the answer is to look at the amount of water which is kept in the catchment—and I do not mean just in the large dams such as Dartmouth, I mean in the smaller dams throughout the catchment. We should let the river run. I know historically that people have been able to walk across the river. I have photographs of families with their horses and buggies having picnics in the river bed.

Nowadays, if we want to use the river, we should be allowing the river to run and not continue to extract at the rate we are. How you manage that and maintain the economies is a very difficult issue, but it is one which we will have to face if the drought does not break and the inflows do not return to what they have been in the past.

What I expect from this government is to make sure that any strategies they put in place are ones that can be reversed. As to the weir at Wellington, having lived there—I know people at Nalpa station and on the other side—it will be a very difficult logistical exercise. The engineering cost alone will be very expensive. When I heard the Premier say that it would cost $20 million, my immediate reaction was that you would have to put a zero on the end of that, because I know that the river by our place at Wellington was 75 metres deep, and it is very deep going into the lake. Obviously, it shallows out, but the mud is something like 20 to 30 metres deep. It is incredibly deep there, so a number of engineering solutions will have to be worked on.

I hope that the people who are living around those lakes and who are suffering are not going to be put in a position where their suffering has no end and those communities end up being ghost communities. It is a tragedy. It is a natural tragedy in many ways but, as I said, it has been exacerbated by the fact that we do not have a river, we have a series of long lakes, and we need to make sure that we learn lessons from the current situation and manage it far more carefully. I support the motion.

Mr PEDERICK (Hammond) (12:51): I rise to support the motion moved by the member for Finniss and to speak about the lack of environmental thought where the Lower Murray and lakes are concerned. That is no better illustrated than when Premier Rann made the announcement on 6 November last year saying, ‘We’ll just build a weir at Wellington for $20 million.' That is only about 2 per cent of the eventual cost of such a structure, and the fact that there is no solid base to build it on means that it would have to be constantly maintained.

In regard to the weir, when I asked a question of Professor Peter Cullen this morning, it was interesting that he indicated that, if it ever did get built, it may only hold back unusable water—and that is my position. It is all right to sacrifice tens of thousands of people below Wellington, but for what reason? If there is no reason and you would have to end up building a desalination plant at Murray Bridge off-takes to feed Adelaide with water, it would be absolutely crazy to put a structure down there.

Apart from the fact that the EIS has only just been commenced in the past couple of weeks, which is outrageous in itself, I hope the government is doing the engineering studies to see what will happen as water levels continue to fall lower and the water quality suffers and looking at the effects not just below the proposed weir but above it. It would be the biggest white elephant that this government ever built, if it went ahead, and it would just render—

An honourable member interjecting:

Mr PEDERICK: If the minister wants to speak to the motion, that's fine.

The Hon. R.J. McEwen: That’s right. Bang the old drum.

Mr PEDERICK: Yes, I will bang the drum, because I am responsible for my constituents and I will bang the drum as hard as I can.

The SPEAKER: Order!

Mr PEDERICK: Thank you, Mr Speaker, for your protection. I will move on to another subject: the leaking barrages. Yes, they are operated through the Murray-Darling Basin Commission but it is SA Water that operates them. What do we have down there? People banging in stocks—bits of PVC, bits of poly pipe and triangular shaped wedges trying to hold the log shut. This is almost Stone Age stuff. The government should be lobbying the federal government if it does not have the funds to completely refurbish the barrages; it should lobby the Murray-Darling Basin Commission, and get on with the job.

There are people around the lakes who are talking about spending half a million dollars to put in private desalination plants, because their livelihoods are just dissolving in front of them. I am well aware of the fact that there is a drought, but it seems that everyone on the Labor side, including the water security minister, who masquerades as a National Party member when it suits, does not seem to realise that the drought has been right throughout this basin for five years. For five years there has been a drought in the Murray-Darling Basin, and that is where the catchment is.

The Hon. K.A. Maywald: Who is responsible for the drought?

The SPEAKER: Order! The member is out of her place.

Mr PEDERICK: Thank you, Mr Speaker, for your protection. I am pleased that you can act. The leaking barrage is a causing major distress in the Lower Lakes. We have salinity ingress (not only from there), salinity from ground water, and salinity from upstream causing major issues in the Lower Lakes. There is a psychological effect from the proposed weir. I wonder if the so-called water security minister has talked to local GPs in the area, who have had to put up with people who are close to suicidal because of the proposal to build a weir at Wellington.

There are major issues with the vineyard industry at Langhorne Creek, which is looking for water, and other industries down there. A program that was going to be instigated, which had controlled flows through the barrages, never eventuated. It was held up through bureaucratic bungling. At the time when it was first discussed there were enough flows on certain days to flush the barrages.

I will close now, because I have noticed the time. I just want to make people aware of what is happening in the Lower Lakes and in the Lower Murray as far as the dairy industry is concerned. Dairy herds are being sold off. Dairying in the Lower Murray and Lower Lakes will probably never recover, apart from the fact that the government has spent only half of the money allocated for the Lower Murray rehabilitation plan. People are parking herds interstate and selling them.

The Hon. K.A. Maywald interjecting:

Mr PEDERICK: No; it is not dishonest, minister; you might want to check your numbers. I will close in saying that one constituent indicated that they would rather shoot the stock, because they are so proud of it, than march it off to the meatworks. It is terrible that this is happening. It is all right to say that, yes, they have been allocated 22 per cent and they have 6 per cent more water, but the access issues in the Lower Lakes are just frightening. I commend the motion.

Debate adjourned on motion of Mrs Geraghty.

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