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House of Assembly - Fifty-Second Parliament, Second Session (52-2)
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PUBLIC WORKS COMMITTEE: RIVERINE RECOVERY PROJECT WETLANDS PHASE 1B INFRASTRUCTURE

Mr SIBBONS (Mitchell) (11:25): I move:

That the 485th report of the committee, entitled Riverine Recovery Project Wetlands Phase 1B Infrastructure, be noted.

The Riverine Recovery Project aims to achieve measurable long-term improvements in the health of the Riverine environment between Wellington and the South Australian border. The Wetlands Phase 1B Project element (referred to as Wetlands Phase 1B) of the Riverine Recovery Project, will predominantly focus on reintroducing wetting and drying of permanently connected wetlands along the River Murray to achieve ecological benefits. The exception is Lake Carlet, where obstruction to flow will be removed to improve connectivity between the lake and the river. The total cost of the works is estimated to be $8,702,000 (GST exclusive), which includes design and project management costs and 30 per cent construction contingency. The wetland areas are:

Lake Merreti, located between Lock 5 and Lock 6;

Lake Woolpolool, located between locks 5 and 6;

Beldora wetlands, located between locks 3 and 4;

Murbko South located between locks 1 and 2;

Kroehn's Landing, located below Lock 1;

Wongulla Lagoon, located below Lock 1;

North Purnong, located below Lock 1; and

Lake Carlet, located below Lock 1.

It is planned that infrastructure will be constructed at four to seven of the wetlands listed above plus removal of flow obstructions at Lake Carlet, depending on available budget and tendered construction cost of infrastructure. The aim of the project is to improve ecological conditions in a suite of implementation-ready wetlands of various types along the River Murray in South Australia, as well as improve hydrological management and deliver environmental water savings. The objectives are:

restore hydrological and ecological functions at targeted wetlands and associated watercourses (e.g. through the reintroduction of wetting and drying regimes);

integrate wetland restoration efforts to ensure a representative mosaic of wetland types at an appropriate landscape scale;

provide environmental water through the development and application of ecologically appropriate hydrological management regimes;

improve hydrological connectivity of targeted wetlands and watercourses with the River Murray and surrounding habitats; and

engage community participation in wetland management.

The project is expected to be complete by October 2014. Given this, and pursuant to section 12C of the Parliamentary Committees Act 1991, the Public Works Committee reports to parliament that it recommends the proposed public works.

Mr PENGILLY (Finniss) (11:29): I have much pleasure in supporting this project. I am very sorry that the member for Chaffey is unwell and not here to speak on this. He is a passionate advocate for the Murray and probably knows more about the Murray than anybody else in this place, quite frankly. The Murray goes through the electorates of a couple of other members in here, but for years and years the member for Chaffey's life, business and family have depended on the Murray, and he was very pleased to support this project and we were very pleased to support it in the committee.

It is interesting where this debate has ended up because, when I first came into this place, along with the member for Hammond, who also has a patch of the Murray in his electorate (and still has), we were told that the world was going to end and Adelaide was going to die from lack of water. I think Sandbags Flannery said that it was never going to rain again. Bob Brown said it was going to take 10 years for the Murray to fill up again.

Eventually it rained and within six months we had water everywhere and Sandbags was proven wrong. It is desperately disappointing that Sandbags has lost his position now and $180,000 a year to go with it, and Bob Brown has sailed off into the sunset, but the fact remains that the member for Chaffey is still here doing a good job. He picked up on the former member for Chaffey, who turned out to be a bit of a disaster and lost her seat absolutely and completely, because she backed the wrong side of politics and forgot about where she came from. We are pleased to have this—

The SPEAKER: The member for Finniss will be seated. The boundaries of relevance are that we are noting the 485th report of the Public Works Committee, not running a commentary on recent Australian history and politics. The member for Finniss.

Mr PENGILLY: Thank you, sir. I am glad you dragged me back to the subject at hand. The reality of it is that this project was put into place largely because of the drought and what followed. We have always had drought in Australia, but we were pleased to support this project. I repeat that it is very disappointing that the member for Chaffey is not here, because he has a far more profound knowledge on these matters than I do, but we do support the project.

The SPEAKER: I, too, wish the member for Chaffey a swift recovery from his malady.

The Hon. R.B. SUCH (Fisher) (11:32): I am pleased to support this project, which has several aspects to it. The first is ecological in terms of restoring to some degree the riverine environment, and that is welcome. The other one, of course, is helping to conserve water and improve the quality of water. The fact that we have had heavy rains recently throughout most of the state should not blind us to the fact that rainfall and water supply can be somewhat variable. I do not think we should get too complacent. It is a bit like bushfires where people think, 'Oh, that was years ago.' Saving water and using it wisely should be an ongoing practice. This is part of that and I think it is to be commended.

I will briefly mention that a project was just completed by the state government, the former federal government and the City of Onkaparinga on wetlands and water recovery in my area. It was an excellent wetlands project adjacent to Candy Road and Byards Road. We need to see more of this sort of thing happening, not just in relation to the Murray, but for all of our creeks, many of which are under significant pressure in terms of degradation, infestation of weeds and other factors.

We have seen the excellent work done by Colin Pitman and people out at Salisbury in terms of creating wetlands and recovering and storing water. Unfortunately, in my electorate we do not have the aquifers that exist out north of Adelaide, so we have issues in relation to storage. However, as I said, we have now seen the completion of a $35 million project in my electorate, which is in keeping with the sort of project that we are talking about today on the River Murray.

We should not stop now. The government should not stop now. Other authorities should not stop now. We have to keep ensuring that we not only restore our rivers and creeks but also store and use water wisely, because for sure we are going to be confronted with dry periods well into the future. I commend this report. It is another excellent initiative aimed at helping the river recover and creating valuable wetlands adjacent to the Murray.

Mr PEDERICK (Hammond) (11:35): I rise also to support the 485th report of the Public Works Committee entitled 'Riverine Recovery Project Wetlands Phase 1B'. Certainly I applaud any work that can be done to recover water, so long as it is done in a sustainable way. When I say 'a sustainable way', we must make sure everyone gets a win out of this—the environment in the first instance, but also irrigators have to have a win and there must be social equity right throughout the river with regard to water savings.

For too long some people, certainly with the Murray-Darling Basin Authority, have taken the easy approach in getting water out of the river with buy-backs. The hard work John Howard pioneered back in 2007, of infrastructure upgrades, should be and should have been well on the way by now. Sadly, that has not happened near as fast as it should have because of the bureaucratic lockups in Canberra, and certainly some bureaucratic lockups here with our Labor government. We need to get these environmental and riverine recovery project water savings in place so that we can get the river back to good health.

I remember during the devastating drought, where the river dropped over a metre and a half below its level of plus 0.75 AHD (Australian height datum), that it was an absolute disaster, especially below Lock 1. At that time, according to the government, Adelaide's water supply was under threat. I made the suggestion at the time that all they needed to do was lower the pumps, and was told that that could not happen. Funnily enough, they then found some engineers who said that it could happen. There were some other flawed policies that were put out there, like a weir at Wellington, which just disregarded everyone south of there in my electorate.

Mr Pengilly: And in mine.

Mr PEDERICK: And in the electorate of the member for Finniss. This would have been utter devastation. A lot of the problem here was that the state government did not negotiate enough water to keep the river running. I think the water was there—not much, I will admit. I remember trying to get 30 gigalitres of water just to cover the base of Lake Albert, just to keep it alive, and I was told that that was too hard. Yet, when you look upstream, when the Murrumbidgee irrigators, with their high-security water, were on 95 per cent water and we were restricted with our so-called high-security water on 18 per cent, you have to wonder what is going on in this country.

I think things are moving on, though, and we are a getting some better environmental outcomes. With environmental outcomes we should have social wins, recreational wins and also economic wins for the river, but it will take a lot of work. The only way the river came back to health last time was because it rained in September 2010 and brought it back to health. It was a great thing to happen because there would have been absolute utter devastation by now if the river had not come back. It is not back to perfect health yet, but it is getting there.

We talk about environmental water. I look at areas of significance in my electorate, like Lake Albert, still running, last time I looked, at 2,700 EC as far as the salt count is concerned, and this is three years down the track from when flows came back. It shows that so much work needs to be done. I know that some work is being done on plans around a connector through to the Coorong, and that needs to be carefully researched so the right outcomes are made if that goes ahead and so that Lake Albert is not just a terminal lake.

Certainly for all the life that relies on the river, all the bird life, the turtles, we do need these environmental watering programs to make sure that the ecology and nature can come back to wellbeing again. I think with the talk of getting thousands of gigalitres of water back into the river—and for every thousand gigalitres, to paint a picture, that is essentially two Sydney Harbours—a lot more of this work can be done with infrastructure upgrades, especially in the Eastern States.

You must commend South Australian irrigators for what they have done over the last 40 years. They are really an icon site as far as river management in this country, because we have had to manage our water so well in the first instance, yet when times got tough, we were the ones who were penalised, and we were still penalised with different projects coming down from a federal scale because supposedly we did not qualify for funding because we were so far ahead of the game as far as irrigation infrastructure and strategies to manage our water. I certainly applaud this initiative, but there is a lot of work to be done and we must make sure that these savings work in concert with our economic base and our social base so that we can have a triple bottom line success rate.

I think some of this might get down to how the desalination plant in Adelaide is managed. We have a desalination plant that is basically puffing along on less than half a cylinder at the moment just because they have been running 25 gigalitres (I think) through it for the last year in precommissioning phase, so essentially mothballed.

I do not want to reach a point where our river is suffering, yet we do not see our government crank up the desalination plant to put water into Adelaide so that we can still have those economic outcomes along the river. It is something that governments are going to really have to think about hard because, yes, desalinated water is the most expensive water, and we have it coming out of I think the most expensive desalination plant in the country at over $2 billion all up with the pipework. A lot of progress still has to be made.

We cannot stand back and think, 'Everything is alright, the water is back in the river', because it will get dry again, and the first thing that suffers when it gets dry is the wetlands. They got locked out during the drought, especially below Lock 1 right throughout my electorate. It was just amazing to see the dry expanses where water usually lies but was no longer. Certainly, I understand that when it gets really dry, some of those wetlands will be locked out again as far as wetting and drying management, but I believe that is part of this Riverine Recovery Project.

At the end of the day, everyone throughout the country, let alone South Australia, has to manage water a lot better, because we do not need to face the disaster that we faced between 2006 and late 2010, because, quite frankly, I do not think the community would cope. It nearly busted the community wide open last time, and we need to have better outcomes right along the River Murray.

Motion carried.

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