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House of Assembly - Fifty-Second Parliament, First Session (52-1)
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NATURAL RESOURCES MANAGEMENT (COMMERCIAL FORESTS) AMENDMENT BILL

Second Reading

Adjourned debate on second reading.

(Continued from 24 November 2010.)

Mr WILLIAMS (MacKillop—Deputy Leader of the Opposition) (12:05): I indicate that I will be the lead speaker for the opposition on this matter. I also indicate that the opposition will allow the passage of this bill through this house, but it will be our intention to refer this in the other place to the NRM committee, as was originally intended by the government. I will come back to that later on in my contribution. I am going to speak at length on this matter. It is a matter that is very near and dear to me—

The Hon. P. Caica: At length or in detail?

Mr WILLIAMS: Both, and the minister might learn something today. He might learn a fair bit from me today. He learnt a bit from me yesterday in question time, but he might learn a lot more today. In introducing the bill, amongst other comments, the minister made this comment in his opening, 'Large-scale commercial plantation forestry has the potential to intercept substantial volumes of water.' Might I suggest that any activity on the landscape has the potential to intercept substantial volumes of water. That is a given.

He also went on to say, 'Reducing run-off and recharge by 70 to 100 per cent when forestry replaces pastoral land use is a fact.' I am not disputing that. What I do dispute are claims made that the forest industry and plantation forests in the South-East use huge proportions of the available water because, to accept that premise, you have to accept that the available water is only a portion of the total water in the water balance of the region. I am going to spend some time today discussing the South-East and the debates that we have been having for at least 15 years, and probably a lot longer. In fact, I am going to start off much earlier than that, and we have learnt a lot along the way.

What I can say—and I say this advisedly; I say it categorically—is that the water policy that we have in the South-East, and have had in the South-East for the last 15 years, is flawed. It is seriously flawed and it has been driven by the vested interests of a greedy minority. That is the reason that this debate has been going on for so long: that a greedy minority, with a large vested interest, have captured this debate and run with it for a long time. They are endeavouring to take it even one step further, to the detriment of the region, of the state and particularly of the forestry industry. I will speak much more on those specific issues as we go on.

Because there are possibly some people in the house who are not aware, I will start off by informing the house that the South-East is a unique part of this state for several reasons. One is that it is much wetter and much cooler than the rest of the state. My home town of Millicent has a climate very similar to that of Stirling in the Adelaide Hills. The average monthly temperature and the average monthly rainfall of Millicent are very similar to those averages in Stirling. That is the sort of climate that it has, but the South-East, by and large, is a flat expanse. It is not hilly or mountainous like the landscape at Stirling; it is largely flat.

The South-East is today called the Limestone Coast region because a thick layer of limestone lies under the landscape, what is called a karst formation, which is quite pervious and pocketed with caves, and it contains and retains huge volumes of water. That makes it quite different from many other parts of the state, as well.

To understand the geography of the South-East, you also have to understand that the South-East that we see today is the result of what we call an emergent land form. Over millions of years (about 4 million years, in fact) the coastline has retreated to the south and to the west as the land form has risen up. As the coastline has retreated to the south and the west, it has left behind stranded beach systems, dunal systems and we have across the South-East, running in a north-west or south-east direction, a series of stranded beach dunal systems.

Before white settlement and before we started to change the landscape, the factors that I have described of a large flat area with a high rainfall and these dunal systems isolating a lot of that flat landscape from the sea, resulted in the South-East largely being a wetland.

In fact, at the time of white settlement there were vast wetlands stretching across the South-East—and I will describe some of them—but suffice to say that George Goyder, in 1864, estimated what he believed was the amount of land between Salt Creek at the bottom end of the Coorong and the Victorian border. He made the statement that in his estimation, because he had been around talking to the local pastoralists in an effort to put a valuation on the land in order to tax those pastoralists or to set rents on those properties, after gaining a close understanding of the landscape at that time, at least half of that land became inundated between one and six feet deep (in the old money or 30 centimetres and 180 centimetres in today's language) each winter. Just imagine the whole of the South-East, half of that land being inundated to that depth every winter from Salt Creek to Mount Gambier and from Salt Creek to the Victorian border. It is a huge area and a huge amount of water.

At the time of European settlement here on the Adelaide Plains, the Henty brothers, who had come from Launceston, had established a settlement at Portland, just across the border from Mount Gambier (about 80 kilometres or something away by road, I think it is) and were quite successful graziers and pastoralists. They had also explored a lot of the surrounding land and had discovered very rich soils in the Mount Gambier area with good pasturage for their animals and, at about the same time as Adelaide was established, they established a small settlement at Mount Gambier.

Mount Gambier, unlike most of the other parts of the South-East, is a little bit higher, it is self-draining and it is not full of swamps and wetlands (although there are a reasonable number of wetlands nearby and in the area) but it was largely ready for agricultural production—particularly grazing, but other agricultural production—because it was not inundated. Not long after settlement of the South-East, Mount Gambier was settled from Adelaide and became a thriving part of the colony.

The good folk of the district of Mount Gambier complained bitterly to the state government that a lot of money was being taken out of the area through land sales, rents and taxes but very little public work was being done in the area and life was quite difficult. They particularly complained that it was taking something like 4½ days to get mail back and forth from Adelaide to Mount Gambier, whereas it was taking about half that time to get mail from Melbourne to Mount Gambier.

In fact, in about 1860 (because Portland was having similar complaints about its government in Melbourne) there was movement started in Portland and joined by the people of Mount Gambier to petition Queen Victoria to form a separate colony in that area, including the western part of Victoria and the southern part of South Australia, because of the lack of effort on behalf of their relative governments.

In 1863, the South Australian government sent a party led by William Milne, commissioner of public works (later to become Sir William Milne), and it included George Goyder, state surveyor-general, and William Hanson, engineer and architect. They did a trip during January 1863 through the South-East to inspect the settlements and the public works and to make some recommendations to the government.

Probably, as a result of that, the first drainage of the South-East began. In 1863-64, I think, a small cut was made in the Maria swamp in Kingston to drain water out of that area. It was some years later in 1867 that Goyder sent a boatload consisting of 100 men to what was then probably called Greytown—the southern end of Rivoli Bay—where they disembarked specifically to start digging drains to drain the South-East in the Millicent district. That movement started the township of Millicent, which was a camp for the drainage workers.

Between that time and right up to about 1970, the mid and Lower South-East were crisscrossed with drains. Drain digging activity continued, somewhat haphazardly at times, right up to 1970, and we have seen a huge change in the landscape of the South-East. To understand what we are doing in the South-East today and to understand the principles behind this piece of legislation, you must have an understanding of what the South-East was like, otherwise you will continue to make the same mistakes that I believe we having been making for at least the last 14 or 15 years in this area.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s the South-East was turned from what could probably be described as a vast swamp into a drained area, an artificial landscape, and then the people who moved into that area cleared most of the native vegetation. It was important to the state of South Australia because the cost of digging the drains was more than returned in the sale of the land that was subsequently dried out and made appropriate for agricultural use. Some of that work underpinned the economy of the state at various times, and anybody who has studied the economy of the state will know that it went through some pretty tough times, particularly in the time of the Victorian gold rush, which is within the time frame that I am talking. We changed the landscape, we drained the water, and we cleared the vast majority of the native vegetation.

Today, this piece of legislation is about a complaint that revegetating a small portion of that region is causing a problem with the amount of water available to another group of people who wish to milk cows, grow grapevines, grow potatoes and grow pasture to fatten livestock. I related that early part of the history of the region because there is a huge disconnect between the reality of what the South-East was like and what we expect it should be like. The introduction of drainage into the South-East, in my opinion, has had a much greater impact on that landscape than people today understand or realise. I say that because I have spent a lifetime trying to get an understanding of the drainage system of the South-East. I referred to the 100 men that Goyder sent down there in 1867; two of my forebears were amongst those 100 men. My family has lived in the Millicent district ever since and has been intimately involved in drainage and farming over the intervening period of 140, 150 years.

Before I came into this place, I was an elected landholder member on the South-Eastern Water Conservation and Drainage Board, the board which manages the drainage system in the mid and Lower South-East, so I think I have a reasonable knowledge of the drainage system and its effect and impacts on the region. I throw that in because I want members to understand that I have a good knowledge of the South-East. I believe I have a good knowledge of the drainage system and its impacts, and I am also incredibly passionate about the region. It frustrates and annoys me that people come along and make assumptions about the South-East when they do not fully understand it. In some cases I do not believe they care a hell of a lot either, and that frustrates me somewhat.

It was not until the late 1960s—in 1967 we had an incredible drought in the South-East—that most people to whom I have spoken became actively involved in irrigation, certainly in the district around Millicent. They took up that activity as a result of the drought in 1967. It was certainly when my family started irrigating, and most of our neighbours, who subsequently went on irrigating, took it up as a result of that drought. It was in what we call the border zone.

The border zone is quite well defined now because it is subject to a border ground water sharing agreement with Victoria, and there is an act of this parliament, as there is with the Victorian parliament, governing that. It extends some 20 kilometres either side of the border. Most of the intensive irrigation activity in the South-East is in that zone, and most of it is south of Naracoorte, although there are pockets of very heavy irrigation north of Naracoorte, certainly in the Padthaway and Keith areas. This bill is not really about those areas north of Naracoorte because there is very little, if any, commercial forestation there. Most of it ranges from probably the Coonawarra, Comaum area south of Mount Gambier, and some to the west.

There is irrigation activity along that border zone because we have largely within that area the Coonawarra wine grape district. In that area and just out of that area we have a substantial dairy industry—particularly south of Mount Gambier—which has long been reliant on irrigation, and we have a reasonable potato-growing industry which has been established for a significant number of years. A lot of that activity was in that area and some was just out of it. The hundred of Grey, around Kalangadoo, has traditionally been a strong potato-growing area, as has Glencoe, a little west of that area.

Regarding that 20-kilometre border zone, I believe that the government seeks to have some different rules whether we are inside or outside of that zone for the reason that we have this agreement with Victoria, which places some constraints on us. But a lot of the serious irrigation occurs within that area. As we move to the west there is less and less irrigation, for two reasons. First, the most significant is that, by and large, the land is not as rich. The richest land in the South-East probably lies closer to Mount Gambier and, as you move both westwards and northwards from Mount Gambier, in general the quality of the land deteriorates. There would be historic reasons for the establishment of some of these industries in those areas as well because they were settled earlier. Notwithstanding that, there is a reasonably long history of irrigation in the area, but certainly not like we have experienced in the Riverland.

We had in some parts of the state recognised a long time ago that we had to regulate irrigation activity to protect the resource. Certainly at a much earlier date we had regulated irrigation activity in the Upper South-East in various places, certainly in Padthaway, around Keith and in the hundred of Stirling, but the decision was taken to prescribe the water resource in the mid and Lower South-East in the mid-1990s. If my memory serves me well, they were prescribed under the Water Resources Act 1996 and with prescription came the job of providing water allocations for those people who were actively involved in irrigation and for those who wished to become involved in irrigation in that area.

This was a very important time, because prior to the prescription of the area, and we see this occurring as I speak in other parts of the state, particularly in the east and western Mount Lofty Ranges, where strong debates are happening now about the prescription process and the water allocation process, and it is very trying for landowners who believe they have certain rights and believe they own certain properties and, with the stroke of a pen, they come to the realisation that that has been taken away from them.

Interestingly (and if members wish to consult the Hansard they will find this in February 1997) the then water minister, David Wotton, made a speech wherein he told the house that he had been to the South-East and consulted with the community there and he knew what they wanted as far as a water allocation plan was concerned, and he put in broad terms the sort of things that he thought that they wanted, and by and large by March of that year, he had adopted a set of principles on which the water allocations would be made. That in itself caused some controversy, and I am very well versed in this particular piece of history because it is what led me to come into this place.

There was a mark II version of the principles on which water would be allocated in the South-East made very quickly after that, and by early June there was a serious call for changes, and a meeting was proposed to be held in Mount Gambier on 27 June 1997, to which a significant number of people were invited to attend. I was fortunate enough to be one of the attendees at that meeting, simply because of my membership of the South-East Water Conservation and Drainage Board, and because I was the member of that board who lived closest to Mount Gambier. The chairman of the board rang and asked me whether I would attend this meeting. I certainly did not get an invitation to the meeting as an interested stakeholder.

The meeting, I came to the realisation at its conclusion, consisted only of invitees because it was a set up. It was designed purely to give an excuse for the government of the day—the Liberal government—to turn David Wotton's water allocation plan on its head, and move from what he had proposed, which I think and continue to think was a very good proposal, which would have seen water allocation made in the initial stage, and water allocation would be made such that each landowner might well have expected to get a water allocation proportional to their landholding, and that is an important thing to remember.

The result of the meeting on 27 June 1997 was that we ended up with a water allocation plan which became known as 'first in, best dressed', where the amount of available water was thrown open and people could apply for a water allocation, and the first to apply, until all the water was allocated, were the ones who got it, and that caused an outcry.

It caused such an outcry that, after that meeting, I wrote a letter, along with one of my farming colleagues, who also happened to be at that meeting because of another board he was on representing the farming community. We wrote a letter to the local newspapers, and three months later as a direct result of that I was elected as the member for MacKillop to this parliament.

The Hon. P. Caica interjecting:

Mr WILLIAMS: I did not hear what the minister said but I can say that I have been talking about water issues ever since then and my vote has gone up at every election I have stood for, so I reckon I am on a winner. I reckon that I am reflecting the broad thoughts—

The Hon. P. Caica: If the Libs had got it right the first time you wouldn't be here.

Mr WILLIAMS: Well, you're dead right there. I do think that I am reflecting the beliefs and feelings of the people in the local community. We have had this change of the water allocation policy, and now we have a water allocation plan which allocated all of the available water. First, there was an opportunity for those who were active irrigators to make a claim to get an allocation based on their irrigation activities over the last three years, and that is an interesting point in itself.

I live in the hundred of Riddoch. Next door is the hundred of Grey. One of my brothers lives in the hundred of Grey and the other lives on the boundary. I know the area and know a lot of the farmers in that hundred very well. I can cite the hundred of Grey because, when all the supposed irrigators in that hundred had made the claim to their activities for the last three years and the allocations were made, the hundred of Grey was allocated to a point of 131 per cent of the available water.

That did not deter the department—it kept writing the water licences and issuing them. We have had the hundred of Grey allocated to a point of 131 per cent of what was believed at the time to be the sustainable yield in that hundred. Once irrigators and farmers had water licences they were obliged to put in an annual return on their irrigation activity. The first year after that obligation was put upon them, I think that about 50 per cent of the water that had been allocated was used, the next year about 50 per cent, and it took some years before even the usage got to 60 per cent of that allocated. That confirmed my belief that at least the average farmer, if not the majority of them, had gilded the lily.

I had this discussion with the then manager of the agency who was implementing these plans in Mount Gambier and who, I think, intimated to me that he accepted my premise that there had been some gilding of the lily. It seemed pretty obvious. I mean, if that amount of irrigation activity had been undertaken in the hundred of Grey, well over a quarter of the total of that hundred would have been irrigated.

I still do, but at the time I would fly in and out of Mount Gambier reasonably regularly, and I can attest to the fact that, as you flew over the hundred of Grey on your way into Mount Gambier, nothing like 25 per cent, 20 per cent or even 15 per cent of that hundred was being irrigated. I put to the manager of the department at the time that he should do something about it; and, although he acknowledged there was an issue and there was probably a problem, he was at a loss as to how we might remedy it.

I did suggest to him that it would not be too difficult to get a set of Landsat photographs to confirm whether people had been gilding the lily or whether they had not. I am not suggesting they all were, and there might have been some genuine mistakes. I know one particular property owner received a water licence (and these are area-based licences) which covered more than the area of his whole farm. I can only assume that was a genuine mistake on the part of a number of people.

However, I know that an officer from the department sat at my kitchen table with my wife and me with some coloured aerial photographs and asked me to delineate the area that I was irrigating at the time and, when I did—I believe, honestly—he said, 'What about this area further down the paddock? You obviously irrigate that.' I asked him when the photograph was taken and he said it was in February. I said, 'The problem is that you are in strawberry clover country and the country still looks green in February. If you came back and took another photograph at the end of March, it would probably look brown.' It would have been very simple for me to have probably doubled the area that I claimed to be irrigating and I would have been issued with an irrigation licence for that.

The fact that the department responsible at the time must have been aware of this practice (and I know the manager of the department in Mount Gambier was aware of it because I called on him more than once) but was uncaring is one of the reasons we are here debating this today, because there are claims that we have pressure on the water resource and we have to put some more restrictions on certain people. What galls me is that this piece of legislation, in my opinion, will put the restrictions on the wrong people: it will put the restrictions on the innocent party and it is probably too late to do anything about the guilty party. I do not expect anything will happen because, in my opinion, the department was one of the guilty parties. Might I say, and I will make some other comments as I go on, that I do not think the department has covered itself in glory in a number of areas in the intervening period in regard to this matter in the South-East.

We wilfully overallocated water in parts of the South-East from day one, knowing, I am arguing, that people were gilding the lily, but nobody bothered to do anything about it, notwithstanding that at least I—and I was not alone—was pointing this out to the department at the time. Ever since, the debate we have been having (and there has been an ongoing debate on water allocation in the South-East) has been largely run by a group of people who have a very large personal vested interest in at least maintaining the status quo or, indeed, shifting the goalposts even further in their favour. Again, the piece of legislation we are debating today, I will argue, is about that: it is about shifting the goalposts even further to their favour. Madam Speaker, can I tell you, that galls me to the bone.

After the prescription in the late 1990s, we went through these processes. Quite early on, there was recognition that there was going to be a problem with forests because, at about the same time or just after prescription and just after these initial allocations, through managed investment schemes we saw a huge growth in the plantation forestry estate in the South-East, particularly in the hardwood (blue gum) industry and particularly in an area west of Penola in the hundreds of Coles and Short, in particular, but also the surrounding hundreds to a lesser extent.

I will come back to talk about that later on, but that in itself, I believe, has given the lobby group that wish to protect their interests something to argue on. We saw this very sudden and extensive land use change, albeit in a relatively small portion of the Lower South-East, but it did give them something to hang their hat on.

We have seen a plethora of research and reports, and argument and debate going back and forth for a long, long time. In fact, there was a working party working on this in the early 1990s. After I came into this place—in fact, I think, in my first term—I sat on two select committees into water allocations in the South-East.

The then shadow minister for environment, now Minister for Health, John Hill, moved to establish the first, and probably the second of those committees, and later became the minister. Amongst my files, I have pulled out a couple of papers today—and I have only brought a small portion of the reports that I have and regularly look to on this matter—and I have a letter here that was sent to the minister on 5 November 2003. It is about this very issue that we are debating today. I will not read out the names that are listed in the letter, but it says:

...[two people's names] have reported that you plan to deliver an ultimatum to stakeholders at the next stakeholder meeting on November 14. Will be required to deliver a recommendation by unanimous approval or majority decision.

That was by 14 November. They believed that the stakeholder group, which was specifically addressing the matter of forestry and its implications on the water balance, would come to a landing on 14 November 2003. That was a fair while ago, and we still have not come to a conclusion on the matter. I do not believe that the bill we have before us is going to get us to a conclusion either, and I hope to expand on that in a little while.

One of the other parts of the story is the water allocation plan that we have sits under the Natural Resources Management Act. We have NRM groups across the state and they, in places where the water has been prescribed, are obliged to produce a water allocation plan. I do not think the act is prescriptive on this, but there is an expectation that they review that and republish a new plan about every five years. I think the latest iteration of the act that we passed through just recently has pushed that out and made that to be a 10-year cycle.

The South-East Water Allocation Plan that is still in vogue today was due to be replaced at the end of June 2006. I know that date quite well because as an irrigator I was obliged to put a meter on my irrigation bores, because part of the new water allocation plan was going to include a conversion from an area-based water licence to a volumetric-based water licence.

Every irrigator in the South-East—and most of us have more than one bore—was obliged to put a meter on every bore. I do not know how many millions of dollars it cost, but it would be in the many millions. We were obliged to do that by the end of June 2006, so that the new water allocation plan could be brought down and signed off by the minister, and we would move on under volumetric water licensing.

I do not know whether anybody reads the meter, but it has been there ticking away ever since. I look at it as it gives me a bit of an understanding of what's happening with my irrigation activity. In fact, I did not even turn one of them on this year because there was so much rainfall during the summer. But there has been an absolute complete failure of the NRM board to fulfil its obligations to renew—

The Hon. P. Caica interjecting:

Mr WILLIAMS: You listen; I'm not finished, Paul. I'm not finished, mate. And if you want to take some of the responsibility, minister, that's fine, because I think you probably are deserving of some. If they get it right, minister, I will agree with them. There has been an absolute failure on behalf of the NRM board which should have had the new water allocation plan out by the end of June 2006. The board and the government agency—and I use the term 'government agency' because the name keeps changing, and the name is quite different now from what it was then—told every landholder and every irrigator that they had to have these meters in. So, as a community we spent these millions of dollars and put the meters in, but the government and the NRM board failed their side of the bargain, so we still do not have a water allocation plan and the minister is saying to me that I am being a bit unfair.

The significant reason that we do not have a water allocation plan and that we did not have a water allocation plan handed down and signed off at the end of June 2006 is that the NRM board acted, I believe, outside the law as established by this parliament. Board members might not accept full culpability for this. They might say, 'We were getting directions from the minister of the day and/or the department,' and that is probably the case, notwithstanding that none of them chose to resign in protest and they continued to accept their position. They have not been able to table their water allocation plan because it does not comply with the law of this state.

What is happening today as we debate this piece of legislation is that the NRM board has sought to develop a plan—and I accept that there might be other culpable parties—and has developed a plan outside the current legislation and has come to the minister and said, 'We cannot table our plan, we cannot give you this plan; you cannot sign off on this plan because it doesn't comply with the law. You have to change the law.'

That is the situation we find ourselves in. I seriously fail to understand how a board (all of its members appointed by the minister of the Crown) has acted for so long outside the law and there are no consequences. I was told that if I did not put a water meter on my bore by the end of June 2006, I could lose my water licence. It was a condition of my water licence. However, the NRM board, possibly with the encouragement of some other parties, has failed completely to uphold its duties in this matter for in excess of five years now and there have been no consequences.

I do not think I am being unfair. I would have thought that, if I was a member of that particular board and I was put in a position like that, I would have walked away. I would have resigned in protest and said, 'There is something wrong here.' That is what I think they should have done but, for their own reasons, they have chosen not to do that. However, in my opinion and in the opinion of a large number of the people of the region, they have failed.

I have had a lot of experiences with the local NRM board and a number of the members of that board and the minister and the departmental officers over the years. One of the failings of our NRM board system—and I think it was deliberately set up this way—is that it is very hard to actually find out who to pin the blame on and that is why I am having some difficulty at the moment working out who to pin the blame on. I have some pretty good ideas who is responsible but I can say that, if those people sitting on the NRM board were doing their duty as I think they are obliged to do at law, we would not be here today debating this piece of legislation. Either we would be debating something else or we would have concluded this at least five years ago. There is a problem.

I am not suggesting that this is a simple issue. I am not suggesting that at all. It is not a simple issue: it is an incredibly complex issue. What I am suggesting is that one of the reasons it is so complex is that we got the water allocation plan wrong in the first instance, we got the water allocations wrong in the first instance, and we allowed the wrong people to run the debate, but we are where we are. I have said this before in this place: we will continue to flounder with this particular issue whilst we remain in denial about what needs to be done. In my opinion, there does need to be some backtracking.

In the minister's words, I have been a bit harsh on the NRM board. Let me talk about the agency. I have said this before in this place, too: it is my belief that there are people in the agency, some of them may be no longer in the agency, who set out in the first instance to protect the state's interests with regard to the River Murray, and I do not blame them for that. But I got the distinct impression that they have been pushing for all of this time a policy position aimed at the South-East simply so that they can then use that as a bona fide position to push a policy position with regard to the River Murray.

In the first instance, when this debate started, there was no recognised stress on the resource in the South-East, but there were some people within the agency who were absolutely adamant that we should put significant restrictions on commercial forestry in the region. I refer back to the letter that I quoted from a few minutes ago way back in 2003, and that was at the end of a period of discussion in the stakeholder group.

In my opinion, that is because there were people in the department—and I think some of them are no longer there and have retired and moved on—who honestly believed that if we could establish some bona fides in this area, we would have a case to argue against Victoria and New South Wales. I want to talk about that because that is a very important factor in this debate. Obviously, there is a lot of plantation forestry happening in southern New South Wales and northern Victoria within the catchment of the Murray-Darling Basin.

There are some people who genuinely believe that if we pass these sorts of laws that we can actually have an argument, probably at COAG, and get the governments of those two states to change their practices and put restrictions in place. To my mind, that is naive. The likelihood of that happening will be about as high as the likelihood of the New South Wales government ringing up tomorrow morning and saying, 'We have it all wrong with water licensing on the River Murray and we are going to take half the water licences away and put all the water back in the river as an environmental flow.' That ain't going to happen, and the New South Wales and Victorian governments are not going to put restrictions on commercial forestry activities in their states in the short term and, I would argue, probably the medium term. Why?

Both of those states have forestry industries, both of them have timber industries and, at this stage, those industries are still significantly operating in native forests. The governments of both of those states understand that activity has a limited lifetime, so the governments of both of those states—and this has been bipartisan, and the Labor Party has formed the government in both of those states until recently, and now they are under the Liberal Party—understand that, until they build a plantation forest estate large enough to move all of their forestry activities out of native forests, they will continue to build that forestry estate. They will not compromise that building. That is the reality of the world we live in.

Irrespective of the smart ideas that some people in the agency might have about us leading the way, all we will be doing is leading our forestry industry in the South-East into oblivion, in my opinion. We rely absolutely wholly and solely in this state for forestry activities on plantation forests—we have historically, we will forever. The forestry industry in the South-East was the starting point of plantation forestry in this state and probably one of the first places in the world to see extensive plantation forestry. It was at the cutting edge of plantation forestry for many years and underpins still about 25 to 30 per cent of the economy of the region down there in the South-East.

That is again one of the reasons why am passionate about it. It is one of the reasons why I will do whatever I can in this place to inform my colleagues and to argue that we should be very careful about protecting that particular industry, because it underpins so many jobs, so many livelihoods and the very fabric of the society in the South-East. That is something which I am going to come back to later on and talk about as well, because I think it is something we have to be absolutely cognisant of. It is one thing to sell off 100 years of forward rotations. That is an act madness, in my opinion, not just because it risks those jobs and those livelihoods, but because it also risks the very industry.

It comes to my mind that the timber industry and the forestry industry in this country is incredibly important. Some of the arguments we are having over water allocations in the South-East—and that is what this is about; this is about who gets the water, whether it is somebody who is growing a forest or somebody who wants to produce more grapes for more wine. We are flat out in this country to sell our wine. We are flat out to sell our milk. We have enough problems trying to sell potatoes. We import billions of dollars annually of forest product, of product into this country which is sourced from forests around the world. It is billions—over $2 billion per year.

It is a no-brainer to say that we should cut down some of our forest estate, undermine all those jobs in that part of the economy so that we can grow a few more grapevines or milk a few more cows. That is a no-brainer. I just throw that in. I will get back to this argument about our being the lead state, our taking the lead and being able to convince our colleagues in Victoria and New South Wales. Already during this debate, and there have been various decisions made in the intervening years, we have seen trees which would have otherwise been planted, innocuously in my opinion, in South Australia being planted in Victoria.

One of the things I did not describe in my earlier description of the landscape of the region is the hydrology of the region. Water, as we all know, flows downhill, and generally that is from the east to the west, and down around Mount Gambier it flows almost south. If you draw the lines of the flow of the underground water in the South-East—there are a few creeks and streams, and there are no rivers, but there is a huge river of this water under the ground slowly moving towards the sea—you can see that as it gets closer to the ocean those lines are basically at right angles to the coast. So, south of Mount Gambier they are almost south, and as you go further up in the South-East they are—

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Member for MacKillop, excuse me, sorry to interrupt you, but would you like to seek leave to continue your remarks?

Mr WILLIAMS: Absolutely, Madam Deputy Speaker.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.


[Sitting suspended from 12:58 to 14:00]


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