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House of Assembly - Fifty-First Parliament, Third Session (51-3)
2009-10-29 Daily Xml
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WATER RESTRICTIONS

Mr WILLIAMS (MacKillop) (14:53): My question again is to the Premier. Now that our storages are full to overflowing—

Members interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Order, members on my right!

Mr WILLIAMS: It is obvious, sir, that government members think that water restrictions in this state are a joke. The people out there in the community see it differently, sir.

Members interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Order!

Mr WILLIAMS: I will start again, sir. Now that our storages are overflowing, when will the government ease water restrictions? As of yesterday, the hills storages held 183.7 gigalitres, with inflows still occurring. Various government figures indicate that at least 39 gigalitres of the water available during the last water year have been carried forward to this year. Another 201 gigalitres from the River Murray are available for this 2009-10 water year, all of which can be carried forward to 2010-11, if necessary and unused, giving a current total availability of 424 gigalitres of water.

The Hon. K.A. MAYWALD (Chaffey—Minister for the River Murray, Minister for Water Security) (14:54): It does give me great pleasure to answer the question from the member for MacKillop. Our storages in the Adelaide Hills are currently sitting at 93 per cent. At 93 per cent, it is substantially higher than at the same time last year when we had 73 per cent capacity in our dams, but the really critically important factor about this is that most of the water sitting in the dams now has come from natural inflow from the Mount Lofty Ranges rather than being pumped from the River Murray. In this financial year we have pumped about 1.3 gigalitres of water and last year it was around about 40 gigalitres of water.

The good thing about this is that it is less water that we will need to pump from the River Murray for this summer's supply for Adelaide. The good thing about that is that water can go towards the 201 gigalitre reserve we need to accumulate for the next water year. We need to acquire 201 gigalitres by the end of this water year so we know we have it in the bank for next year's critical water needs.

It is important to note that we did carry over 39 gigalitres from purchased water last year. It is also important to note that we are actually purchasing 60 gigalitres this year, also for critical human needs. With the 40 or 50 that we do not have to pump from the River Murray this year, we are still 52 gigalitres short in accumulating our 201 gigalitres for next year, and we will be certain to accumulate that over the course of the next couple of months from future inflows into the system. We will monitor that very closely and, should we have a shortfall there, then cabinet will consider whether we need to purchase more water to ensure that we have the amount of water.

No government would be silly enough at this stage with one rainfall over a bit of winter from the extreme drought we have been in just to actually relieve restrictions, turn the tap on, particularly when it is raining. The Adelaide community is using less water as a consequence of the rain that we have received locally this winter, and in actual fact our figures this year are the best ever for the last weeks in relation to the low amount of water that our community is using. This is creating for us a bit of a buffer zone by which we can actually look at how we apply restrictions particularly over the hotter months.

What the government is committed to doing now is actually to consider how we might apply that water in an extreme heat potential policy that we are developing at the moment to be used over the summer period. The more that we save at this time of the year, the more we will have available over the hotter summer months, and I think that is a very sensible policy, rather than just calling on the government to actually turn the taps on, while it is raining, to water trees.

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