House of Assembly - Fifty-Second Parliament, First Session (52-1)
2011-03-22 Daily Xml

Contents

SAFE DRINKING WATER BILL

Second Reading

Second reading debate resumed.

Mr VAN HOLST PELLEKAAN (Stuart) (17:15): Thank you very much, Madam Deputy Speaker. You have put me under pressure now with the 'cut and thrust', but I will progress the way I was going to anyway.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: I was not actually thinking of you.

Mr VAN HOLST PELLEKAAN: Just because I am next I thought I was under pressure. This is important. Our shadow minister for health tells us that the minister has actually consulted very well on this and has been quite thorough. He and his staff have done that, so I think he is to be congratulated. I would also like to say that I wholeheartedly support the intent of this bill. The concept of providing guaranteed, or as close as can possibly be given as guaranteed, safe drinking water to everybody in South Australia, I think, is commendable and very, very important.

My concerns, as is often the case, are about people a long, long way away from Adelaide. At the expense of potentially sounding a bit like a broken record, I am going to share some of those concerns with the chamber. I said in my maiden speech that I would stick up for the people of regional, remote and outback South Australia, and I am certainly not going to stop.

We are told that 94 per cent of South Australians currently already receive water directly from SA Water, so they should be comfortable and I am sure they are. We are trying to deal with 6 per cent and I think it is a good positive step to try to deal with improving the quality of water, and it is probably important to say, guaranteeing the quality of water because, in some cases, and I suspect in most cases, the quality of the water will not actually be improved. It will be more the classification and the guarantee of the water that will actually be made clearer for people.

I have a fear that right now, having that 94 per cent/6 per cent split, one of the unintended consequences of the bill is that it might actually be 100 per cent because the 6 per cent just slip off the radar and it is all a bit too difficult. We have a list of remote communities that currently receive non-drinking water supplies, so clearly, they are really not affected by this unless they choose to step up and actively participate. This is about guaranteeing that people know exactly what they are drinking, what they are choosing to consume and whether they are happy to have the local supply or do something different.

As I said, I do not think that the water quality will actually improve in most of these remote communities. I think it will mean that remote communities supplying their water one way or another will actually have to decide whether they are going to participate in a more rigorous proving process, if you like, than they currently do, or just say, 'Look, we have always supplied this water. We have always called it drinking water. We are quite comfortable with the quality, but it is actually becoming a bit hard for us to meet all of the criteria that we have to under this new law. We will give you exactly the same water but we will just call it non-potable.'

That has actually been happening for quite a while anyway, so I think it is probably incorrect to say this will improve the quality of the water. I think what it will really do is make the quality of the water easier to define, and I think that quite often we might be getting perfectly good water that is called non-potable because of it. I would like to just give a few small examples and I look forward to participating in a very positive spirit in the committee stage, because I would be more pleased than anybody here if some of my concerns can be satisfied in the committee stage. That would be terrific.

I am not actually looking for problems but, for example, I will be looking for some details on the chain of supply. There are instances where very good high-quality water is received but then exactly the same water moves on, in very responsible supply fashion, I am confident, but it does not have that tick of accreditation along the way. What is going to happen there?

A specific example is a roadhouse in outback South Australia that receives water direct from the SA Water pipeline, but then it sells the water out of its own storage tanks to a handful of houses in that local remote community, all for the right reasons. It does not make money on it. The community has put in the pipelines and the meters so that everybody knows who gets charged for what.

Would those end users need that business to provide some extra classification because the water has come out of the pipeline, been supplied to the business fully accredited but gone into their own storage and into the local pipework, and then, very often through pipework personally installed by non-accredited people, into their own household plumbing? Where do you draw the line?

It might be very easy in that instance to say, 'Look, we are only talking about a few hundred metres and we have looked at the flow of the water and there is not enough sitting still or getting stagnant so, yes, we would be happy for that to continue.' I am sure that would be the case if there was no invoice being charged for the water. I am sure if it was gratis that would all be okay, but when you start charging for that water is there an obligation to provide, with the water, with the invoice, some guaranteed certification of quality?

Another very real example is a community where water is supplied by a very large company, but then it is supplied to a progress association, and then from the progress association to the local residents. So, it is a very similar situation, except much more distance is involved. I want to know what is going to happen to that water supply, because people may not know that an enormous amount of water supplied throughout outback South Australia is actually supplied to the end user by volunteer progress associations.

Sometimes they make a little bit of money out of the transaction. They are not making money out of water; they are making money out of their own free labour that they contribute, and their own bookwork, their own running around checking meters and their own laying pipework so that the small amount of profit that they make on the water they can keep in their own community for running the streetlights, community events and things like that.

I am not on a witch-hunt to look for problems, but I will be looking for some guarantee and some comfort that these people will not lose their water supply, perhaps because the business says, 'Look, it's all too hard. I'm not going to do it. Guys, I would love to keep supplying you with the water but I am at risk as a business—not me personally, but the business is at risk—because if I do this and then if there is a quality problem, it comes back to the business.'

A progress association might say, 'Look, it's all too hard. We would love to keep doing it but we are just volunteers. We are not in the water quality business. We are happy to handle it, we are happy to receive what we know is good water and we are happy to pass it on. We are happy to lay some pipework, but it is beyond the scope of our volunteer organisation to actually give you that guarantee and we don't want to pay the money to do the testing, and if we have to then it's not worth our while anyway.'

I am concerned about the potential negative impact on tourism. Certainly a lot of work has gone into bed and breakfasts and farm stays. I understand that and I think that is commendable, but there are a lot of other tourism businesses further down the line. I think of Innamincka, for example, which is a very important tourism destination in outback South Australia, about 1,100 kilometres north of Adelaide and about 30 kilometres from the Queensland border—a very remote place which gets approximately 50,000 tourists a year.

Despite enormous investment—I think approximately half a million dollars went into that water supply system about six or seven years ago—the water supply at Innamincka is very poor quality water. Let me be very clear about that. Essentially, it is settled Cooper Creek water that people get through their businesses and houses. While it is poor quality, people are very glad to have it; please do not mistake me. It is nowhere near drinking-quality water.

You probably could drink it at times of the year when the creek is flowing well. You absolutely should not drink it at other times of the year when the creek is not flowing and there is a risk of stagnation. That water is very, very gratefully received by the businesses there. Nobody claims it is drinking water. I understand that that is not captured under this bill, because they are not claiming it to be drinking water, not pretending that it is, but I would be very concerned if the next piece of legislation on this topic meant that that was prohibited, that they were not allowed to supply any water into houses and into businesses, into motels, into caravan parks, and that sort of thing, because the supply of water is incredibly important.

Again, it is volunteers who do this sort of thing. The rate for non-potable water, while I certainly do not know all of them for outback South Australia, is significantly less than the standard rate for full quality drinking water. I would be very concerned if this was the thin end of the wedge, potentially—I know it is not included in this piece of legislation—if it was going to make it harder and harder and harder for water to be supplied to all of these remote communities.

I am also very concerned that two weeks and one day ago we had the announcement that the remote areas electricity scheme was going to increase tariffs to outback users. Again, it is a separate issue, but I really do worry that, following so closely on the heels of that, with four days notice, I think, in 13 communities electricity consumers were told that they were going to have a very significant increase in their cost of electricity, we might just flow on. We will find that in weeks, months or years all of a sudden it is so much harder and so much more costly to supply water to outback towns as well.

I really do think that the government underestimates the importance of these outback towns. I look at a place like Innamincka, one of my very favourite places in the state. It has a population of about a dozen permanent residents and visitation of approximately 50,000 people a year. That town, those businesses, those people and, incredibly importantly, the volunteer progress association that supplies water, do a remarkable job to somehow cater for those 50,000 people.

If the government were to look at that in a town of 12 people that cares and says, 'What's the matter? That's not a big issue. How much did you expect us to invest to support that town, whether its electricity or water or whatever the issue is?'—I am not only thinking of Innamincka (I am thinking of that as just as an example)—that would seriously undervalue the enormous economic contribution that the 50,000 visitors make every year not only to Innamincka but to everywhere else.

You cannot just go to Innamincka unless you are fortunate enough to have your own plane or charter a plane to fly there from interstate. Apart from that, you must spend money all the way through South Australia if you come from the south, and that benefit is spread from Adelaide all the way to Innamincka. If you cannot get to Innamincka, then there is a good chance you would not go to the Flinders Ranges. Many, many people go to the Flinders Ranges and Innamincka. If they could not get to Innamincka, they might not go to the Flinders Ranges.

It is an example of what I really do fear may be some shortsightedness on behalf of the government. It affects roads, it affects water, and it affects a lot of other services that are provided. Purely looking at the population impacted, it would be a grave mistake, so I ask the government to keep that in mind when they look at how they might implement this legislation with regard to water. The water is not just for the local community: in most outback towns, the water is for the visitors who provide a very necessary economic contribution to our state.

I will leave it at that. As I said, I look forward to being able to ask some very positive questions when we get to the committee stage. I have some concerns, but I would be very pleased to have those concerns put to rest in the committee stage, with an assurance from the minister and his advisers.

Mr GRIFFITHS (Goyder) (17:29): I will be brief in recognising the contributions made by various members today from both sides of the chamber. Given that water is such an important issue for the seat of Goyder, which is, as you would all know, the Yorke Peninsula and Adelaide Plains, I did think it important to put on record some issues that I am aware of that no doubt will impact on this.

The peninsula has an amazing number of visitors per year. Even though the council area of Yorke Peninsula has approximately 12,000 permanent residents, in peak times that population is at least fourfold approaching 50,000 people. In the period I did not reside on the peninsula, very early in 2000, there was an outbreak at the Paskeville storage dam of an algae which resulted in all the peninsula's water supplies being contaminated. This occurred at Easter—the absolute worst time of year that you could ever consider, other than January, I suppose, when the peninsula is also very crowded. Suddenly every person found that they could not use the water supply because of the risk of contamination.

Having not been there at the time, from what I have been told the response was very good. Not only were tanker trucks going around supplying those facilities that needed water such as hospitals, aged care facilities, public areas, hotels and that sort of thing, but also homes were provided with as much bottled water as they needed free of charge. It emphasised that it is quite easy for a water supply to be contaminated.

While every effort went into preventing such an occurrence at that major storage facility—which I believe is 90 megalitres in size, so it is quite significant—it did occur, and it was an SA Water-controlled site. It resulted in an area of 5,500 square kilometres, with 12,000 permanent people and 50,000 people there for that long weekend over Easter, suddenly finding that the water posed a health risk to them.

Since then SA Water, no doubt through government processes supported financially, has actually built a covered storage facility which is a bit like a waterbed to use a simple term. You can walk on it; it is rather amazing. I went to the opening of the facility in 2001 when John Meier was the member for Goyder. No doubt the peninsula is very proud of that fact because it has allowed us to have some confidence in the fact that there is no further risk of that occurring. But what occurred 11 years ago has made everybody quite aware of the fact that water quality is an issue they have to be prepared to deal with in the future.

An issue for the Goyder electorate also is the fact that water and its availability is in many ways the key to the future growth of the area. There are 16 communities that do not have access to a reticulated potable water supply. Those communities have always relied solely upon rainwater supplies. I note that this bill does not impact on domestic use of rainwater tanks, but I have some questions similar to those posed by the member for Stuart about water movements and the guarantee of quality.

I will relate it in this way. In those communities many of the homes that rely solely upon rainwater are holiday homes; therefore, the lack of a permanent occupancy reduces the demand and means that the rain that falls in most cases supplies the water necessary for occupation when it takes place. Some of those places are used as rental properties, which puts increased pressure upon them. Those that are there permanently find that no matter what level of storage they have, they run out of water no matter how careful they are with the water supply. It is putting pressure on communities and individuals to be involved in transporting water from the closest potable source, which in most cases is a standpipe of some form, to get it to homes, fill up tanks or put some water in tanks at least to get people by until the heavens open and we get enough rain. That in itself creates issues with regard to the transport of it and the guarantee of the quality of that water.

While the people who transport that in the main, as I understand it, are contractors committed to assurity of the quality of the supply, I am interested to find out during the committee stage and in other members' contributions about the impact that would have upon most people who do it in a commercial way.

There is also the question posed to me about the circumstances whereby the District Council of Yorke Peninsula operates three supplies to independent townships independently from SA Water. They are Balgowan, Black Point and Hardwicke Bay. In those instances, SA Water was unable or unwilling to extend its main network to provide a storage and reticulation supply to those communities. The council and the communities worked upon it proactively. They have taken an offshoot. They put extensive storage facilities in place. They guarantee the quality of the water that is within most facilities. It is then reticulated down to the individual connections in the homes in these towns, then in most cases it goes into a storage tank because it is on a restricted flow of a maximum of 10 litres per minute, therefore the pressure of that does not allow it to come straight out of the tap. But in many instances this water will sit there for some time. The concern I raise is: is there any risk of any chemical reaction which will create problems with the water? I certainly hope not.

I am not sure, there are probably some people who have purifiers on those, and some people probably do regular testing on it, but indeed it poses to me the question of what is occurring with local government in those communities that do have private schemes to ensure that they are able to continue; because really, without them, those communities would be very frustrated and it would restrict them enormously. So, we have to make sure that we can keep them going.

I just want to recognise the fact that the opposition, as I understand it, is supporting the bill. It is a step forward. It is going to provide a forum to ensure that the quality of the drinking water remains as appropriate as it can be. Water is the basic premise that all in the community need. Having lived in houses for 95 per cent of my life that have relied upon rainwater and done so quite happily, believing it is the best option for us when it comes to a water supply in our home—a lot better than that stuff that comes out of the tap through the pipe network, but we use that for other purposes—I do recognise the fact that it runs the risk of being tainted in some way.

While this bill does not pick up on that issue—and I hope that no other legislation in the future ever will—it does prove to me that we have to make sure it is right. We do not want another situation like the one that occurred at Paskeville in early 2000, when the supply to a whole region was tainted in some way and was unable to be used.

I am therefore presuming that the introduction of this bill indeed is going to create some need for SA Water to review its storage facilities and maybe look at future investments that need to take place, to consider its network of distribution mains and the quality that they guarantee through those, and to look at the storage tanks that they hold in many of the elevated positions to give head pressure to ensure that communities have good flow through their pipe network. But let us make sure that we actually get the positive outcome, and that South Australians have confidence in the fact that the water supply that they take for granted will be forever of the highest possible quality.

Mr PEDERICK (Hammond) (17:36): I rise to make a contribution to the Safe Drinking Water Bill 2011, and will try to be concise. I will say that members on this side of the house have made some excellent contributions with regard to this bill and I note it is about making our water supply safe for everyone, which is highly important, but we also have to have surety of supply. I note that, during the recent drought, supplies to 95 per cent of this state were threatened because of the lack of water coming down the River Murray.

I believe the government's ill-fated plan to build a temporary weir at Wellington was the wrong move, and I think the right move is to negotiate more water for the river in the longer term so that we do not have to go down that path, so that we can flush the two million tonnes per annum of salt and other nutrients out the river so that we can have a healthy river system.

It is interesting to note that SA Water was even thinking, during the height of the drought, about putting a small desalination plant onto the Keith pipeline, which my property feeds off at Coomandook. I said to SA Water at the time, 'What are you going to do with the salt?', and they looked at me and I thought, 'Well, yes, that's an interesting concept.' That never went ahead, salinity got to a pretty high level, the water was almost not able to be used, but we survived.

We survived much better on the Keith pipeline, as people were used to drawing water from the river through a paid system, than did a lot of people down towards Milang and Point Sturt and also down towards the Narrung peninsula and around Meningie, who had been able to draw water for stock and domestic use out of Lake Albert and Lake Alexandrina. After a lot of bureaucracy, emergency pipelines had to go in. Thankfully the pipelines went in a lot more quickly than the bureaucracy took. I must commend the contractors involved who, when they got down there with several crews working flat out, got water into those areas when it needed to happen.

We still have the problem today where people round Lake Albert cannot use that lake's water for irrigation because of the Narrung bund, which is still in place because of this government's reticence to remove it. That bund, along with the other two at Clayton and Currency Creek should have gone out before yesterday, so that we can get this river flowing, get fresh water into the system and have people enjoying the access to water as they did in the past and as they should do in the future.

I have talked about the emergency pipelines. Water is very significant in this state, and other members have talked about their use—especially those members like me on the land. I have around 270,000 litres of storage of rainwater on my property, though that is backed up with a supply of river water. It is noted how people look at rainwater differently. When you have got it and you drink it and bathe in it you know how good it is. Sure, it falls on the roof and there is dirt. There can be all sorts of things, but it is still a very clean source of water.

When I look at where we have gone with respect to water supplies for this state, and we note that the River Murray is piped over 800 kilometres to Ceduna, it just shows the shortsightedness of the state government when, in years gone past, the former member for Flinders, Liz Penfold, had investors wanting to put in small desalination plants over on the Eyre Peninsula, but they were denied third-party access to the distribution network.

I would like to think that that gets partly addressed by this bill so that people with vision can access SA Water pipelines so long as their water is up to scratch to safe drinking water standards. It would be far more sensible to desalinate water over on the far West Coast than to pump river water that far, because they certainly have water issues over there. However, the member for Flinders will be able to reflect on that better than I can.

It is also of note that, when the new pipelines went through, constituents in my electorate at Wellington East had been used to sourcing water from a council provided system, the Coorong council. When the pipeline went through about half the people who came to us said, 'We want access to the pipe,' and the other half said they did not because, obviously, there is a cost in hooking up to it. It is something like $3,500 to hook up to the River Murray piped water, and some did not want to do that.

What I will say is that at least the people putting in the pipe put in a T-valve there so that, if the pipe does go down those few kilometres to Wellington East, water could be supplied there. Also, most of those residents there have been very handy in putting in quite a bit of rainwater storage for their use.

A lot of the other issues have been covered ably by other members in this place. As I said, my main concern is that we actually have supplies of water, because I think that, as much as some people, especially some irrigators, always point to the stock and domestic supplies taken by Adelaide in this state, I still firmly believe that if we did not have one million people on the end of the river during this recent drought the Eastern States would have just cut us off and we would not have got anything, especially below Lock 1.

That may be cynical, but you see how water has been talked about lately and almost fought over for the last 100 years in this state, and I firmly believe that, yes, we do need to ease Adelaide's reliance on the river but I do not think we ever want to wean Adelaide off the river.

I note that also we are backing up our water supplies with a $2 billion, 100-gigalitre desalination plant when, if action had been taken earlier, perhaps we could have built a smaller desalination plant equivalent to the first one built in Perth of about 50 gigalitres that was built for $300 million—far better value for money.

Just before I close, I know that there has been some discussion on using blackwater or greywater for drinking purposes. Certainly, we witnessed this over at Perth where some industries were linked up to, I think, about a six gigalitre per annum system of blackwater being cleaned up for industrial use. They loved that water for industrial use, because they took out all the nutrients and they could get quite good use out of it. Mind you, I think that, as we have seen in other states, we are a long way off going anywhere near drinking blackwater. I note that in Europe, and I was there recently, it is recycled many times through sets of kidneys—they just have to because there is a finite source of water and we have to make the best use of it. I note that we do support the bill, but I also note that the shadow minister will be asking some pertinent questions during the committee stage.

Mr TRELOAR (Flinders) (17:45): I take this opportunity late in the day to very quickly put some things on the record. I, like others on this side of the house, rise to support the Safe Drinking Water Bill. It is very timely, I believe, that this bill has come along. Water has been a topic of much discussion right around the state and certainly on Eyre Peninsula.

I mentioned water security in my maiden speech in this place just under 12 months ago, and I highlight today the importance of not just safe drinking water but also good drinking water. On Eyre Peninsula, we have quite a unique system, which was originally sourced from the Tod Reservoir, a source that has now been taken offline due to high salinity levels. I appreciated the Minister for Environment and Conservation, at my invitation, visiting Flinders in recent weeks and taking the opportunity to visit that reservoir with me to highlight the situation out there and to view its infrastructure and catchment and also to discuss the future role for that particular reservoir in our ongoing water security; we await the findings of the minister and SA Water on that.

With that reservoir being taken offline, we now have 85 per cent of our water supply coming from what we call the southern basins, which is a series of underground lenses south of Port Lincoln. The other 15 per cent, as mentioned by the member for Hammond, comes from the River Murray, as a result of the extension of the pipeline from Iron Knob out to Kimba. It was quite controversial at the time; I know the previous member for Flinders was quite concerned about that extension of the pipeline. As it happens, it would seem that there is ample river water in the River Murray to supply that extra 15 per cent to Eyre Peninsula.

There are some quality issues around the water sourced from the southern basins. The water travels up to 400 kilometres from just west of Port Lincoln all the way to Ceduna, and it is high in calcium. The southern lenses are enclosed within calcium carbonate, or limestone aquifers and, as a result, the water that is drawn from those lenses is highly calcareous. The difficulty is that, as the water travels north, it warms up in temperature.

During summer, the water warms to a point where the calcium carbonate particles begin to settle out and it becomes solid, solidifying the pipes and, ultimately, it can block up water pipes on particular properties and in homes. It is particularly severe on home hot water services. I understand that on Upper Eyre Peninsula the hot-water services that are using the SA Water supplied resource have a very limited life span. So, therein lies the discrepancy, as I see it, between safe water, which this undoubtedly is (it meets all the qualities required of it to be of a potable standard) but it is not necessarily good water.

We have had on Eyre Peninsula in the last two years significant recharge into those southern basins as a result of wet winters and also wet spring conditions. So, I am expecting the current review into water restrictions on Eyre Peninsula to come back with a positive outcome. We are still sitting on level 3 water restrictions; the minister, once again, has given an undertaking to review that. My understanding is that water levels in the basins have risen 0.4 of a metre, which is significant, given the size of the basins; a lot of water has been added to those basins in the last two years.

The member for Hammond and other members have mentioned third-party access to SA Water infrastructure, and I believe this is imperative. It will give the opportunity for small suppliers, and I am thinking particularly about communities and towns around the coast of Eyre Peninsula, such as Ceduna, Streaky Bay, Elliston, Tumby Bay, Port Neill, Arno Bay, Cowell—the list goes on. I believe they all have the opportunity to install relatively small desal plants purely and simply to supply their own small community's local townships. In order to do this, it would be appropriate for those suppliers to have third-party access to SA Water infrastructure. Thus far this has been denied.

I understand that the government at some point in the near future is going to lay this on the table, and I would very much support that. I understand that the District Council of Ceduna is having discussions with a particular company at the moment and is expecting a small desal plant to be installed some time in the near future, providing all the ducks can be lined up, so to speak, and that that water provider will put water into the Ceduna township. It will be a test case.

The company is able to do that without using SA Water infrastructure, but I think it will be interesting to see how that goes for a stand-alone enterprise. They are quite sure that it can be profitable, achievable and can provide the required outcome. I support the Safe Drinking Water Bill, bearing in mind that there are some bigger issues at stake around water security in the long-term, particularly as we hopefully expand industries and population in the regional areas, and that needs to be borne in mind all the time.

The Hon. J.D. HILL (Kaurna—Minister for Health, Minister for Mental Health and Substance Abuse, Minister for the Southern Suburbs, Minister Assisting the Premier in the Arts) (17:51): I thank all members sincerely for their contributions to this debate. I thank the opposition for supporting this bill. I think it is fair to say that they are in furious support, and that is a good thing. Obviously, water is an incredibly important issue for all of us in South Australia, and it is an issue of great moment for those who represent rural areas, so I understand why they spoke with such passion.

Ironically—and this was not planned—today is World Water Day. Congratulations to everybody for speaking on World Water Day, which is apparently a United Nations initiative. I would have liked it to be called World Water Week so it could be WWW, but it is not.

I thank everybody for their contributions. I also want to take this opportunity to thank Dr David Cunliffe, the Principal Water Quality Adviser for the department, who has been instrumental in doing the work on this bill and getting the balance right between water protection and community and business interests, and also taking it through the consultation process. I thank members opposite for their positive comments about the consultation process, and that is largely due to Dr Cunliffe and his team's efforts. I also want to thank Richard Dennis, from parliamentary counsel, who looked after this, and I think one of his staff, Annette Lever, also helped.

I think the member for Morphett wants to raise a number of issues in the committee stage, so I will go through those. A couple of issues were raised by the member for Bragg, who made some claims which are not based on fact, which really need to be corrected for the record. She made some statements in relation to the 2007 cryptosporidiosis outbreak—that is a disease that comes from consuming cryptosporidium, I am advised.

The member for Bragg alleged that only a media release was issued and nothing further occurred—I think that is how she put it. I am advised that the Department of Health did: (a) provide information to GPs; (b) provide specific information to schools; and (c) provide information to swimming pool operators. I am also advised that the causes of the outbreak were not established and the department's concern was the secondary transmission, particularly through swimming pools. So, I think it is unfair to make those claims about the department. We are always happy to cop criticism, but it should be factually based. With those words, I commend the bill to the house. I understand that the opposition wishes to go into committee, which we might do on another occasion.

Bill read a second time.

Committee Stage

In committee.

Clause 1.

Progress reported; committee to sit again.