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House of Assembly - Fifty-Third Parliament, First Session (53-1)
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Natural Resources Committee: Annual Report 2013-14

Adjourned debate on motion of Hon. S.W. Key.

That the 99th report of the committee, entitled Annual Report 2013-14, be noted.

(Continued from 29 October 2014.)

Mr VAN HOLST PELLEKAAN (Stuart) (11:20): It gives me great pleasure to rise to make a few brief comments on the Natural Resources Committee Annual Report from last year. It gave me great pleasure for the entire term of the last parliament and much of this year to serve on that committee. It is work that I thoroughly enjoyed doing on behalf of the parliament and behalf of my constituents. I think that this committee, more than any other that I have had anything to do with directly or indirectly or heard about, is one that if people from outside the parliament actually had a look at how it works, what it achieves and what it tries to do for South Australia, they would be very proud of what this parliament does.

It operates in a very positive bipartisan fashion. That is not to say that members of the committee do not come with different views to the table, but it is a very positive committee that does excellent work, and I know that the member for Ashford deserves a great deal of credit for that good work as the chair of that committee and keeps it working in a very positive way.

As well as the work being enjoyable and productive, it is very important work that the committee does overviewing our state's natural resources. Apart from people, there is really nothing more important that we have in our state than our natural resources. The work is sometimes frustrating because, of course, there are a lot of things we cannot fix, and a lot of things we cannot actually do in the committee, but we can bring a lot of issues to light.

The two staff members, Patrick Dupont and David Trebilcock, contribute enormously to that work as well. The committee, I think, put out 14 separate reports in the previous 12 month period that is canvassed in the annual report, and I think that that probably leaves any other committee for dead with regard to the amount of work that was put in and put out by the committee.

I will just touch on a few things very briefly. One of the foundation pieces of work that this committee does is look at NRM levies, and it is a difficult issue. I have said in this place many times that the work that good people do in the regions—who work within the Department of Water and Natural Resources for the NRM boards and in that sector of the broader DEWNR work—is very good, and is actually endless. You could spend an endless amount of time and an endless amount of money trying to address the issues out there in the environment that need to be addressed. So how to set the levies is nearly an impossible task because you could find a very good justification for extra money for extra work just about everywhere that you look but, of course, it would be completely unfair to burden the taxpayer, the property owners and the water users with paying those levies with endless amounts of money.

So I took a view when I was on that committee until earlier this year that all levies should be locked in at or below CPI, because there is an important principle that the committee could, if it wanted to, endorse levy increases greater than CPI if there was appropriate justification. I think you could always come up with appropriate justification for extra money for extra good work, so I just decided in terms of the one vote that I had on the committee that I would always vote for levy increases below CPI and against levy increases above CPI because I thought that that was an appropriate way to try and find that balance.

Water, of course, is a very, very important issue. At the behest of the member for Flinders our committee put a lot of time and effort into trying to look into water supply on the Eyre Peninsula, and also did a fair bit of work, which is ongoing from pre-2010, into the Upper South-East scheme, which was very important water. We looked at a wide range of things. I will just touch on two more of them.

One was the AWNRM area, and we did manage to visit part of that area, but were not able to visit the other part. We went to the northern area but not the southern or western area. It has been very difficult, I understand, over successive parliaments for that committee to get there, for different logistical reasons. However, I know the members of the committee want to get there and they put time aside on a few different occasions to get there, and it was local, logistical issues which prevented the committee from visiting.

I do really hope that those issues are able to be overcome in the near future because that is a very important part of the world that deserves as much attention as does any other NRM region in the state. However, if the committee cannot get there to see, feel, touch and taste the issues on the ground, the Natural Resources Committee of parliament cannot support that area as well as it can the other areas that it is able to get to. I genuinely hope that these issues are overcome.

The last area that the committee put a lot of time into, which I will touch on, is with regard to bushfires. Bushfires is a very broad topic, but there was essentially consideration of bushfire preparedness and looking at the risks and the preparedness in the Adelaide Hills, but with consideration to bushfires and other natural disasters more statewide. I will say again what I have said in this place: what I learnt about the risks that exist in the Adelaide Hills was absolutely shocking. I am not a person with great personal connection to the Adelaide Hills, so perhaps it was more eye opening for me than for others, but I am a person with great personal connection to bushfires in my own electorate, in fact in my own home town, and that sort of thing.

In combining my knowledge of bushfires and involvement with what I learnt specifically about the Adelaide Hills area, it is not alarmist to say that there is an enormous risk of a human tragedy occurring. I know that every member of this parliament would take this risk very seriously. There is combination of hilly terrain and extremely high fuel load and narrow, winding streets, which are often blocked by parked vehicles in such a way that a fire truck would really struggle to get up that street, let alone try to turn around and get out of that street if it needed to for its own safety or because it had done its job and needed to get to another section to provide support.

For me, most alarming of all is the risk of people, if they did responsibly heed the warnings and try to leave an area early, getting caught in a fire because the fire came earlier than expected, etc. I am not even talking about the people who just brushed it off and said, 'She'll be right, mate,' and did not try to make an effort. The capacity for that section of metro Adelaide to evacuate in motor vehicles over the few hours in which they would have to do it, ideally in advance of a fire coming, and to get out would, I suspect, be quite impossible, let alone overlaying this with the possibility that it could be happening when the bushfire was actually there and the tragedy that would occur.

There are a lot of issues that really concern me. Of course, most of the work we did was focused on regions, but that work, which covered more than just the last financial year, to me was the most striking and the most alarming. It is what our parliament and our government and our state and local people, who work and live in that area, should address, and it went far beyond anything else that the committee actually did, and there was lots of other important work.

Mr TRELOAR (Flinders) (11:29): I rise to speak on the 99th report of the Natural Resources Committee—a committee which I joined in June this year, taking the place of the member for Stuart, who of course moved on to the Economic and Finance Committee. I am very pleased to join this committee. I have a reasonable background in natural resource management; I came up through the Landcare movement and was an inaugural member and onetime president of the Edillilie Landcare group, which began way back in the early 1990s. I progressed from that to the Lower Eyre Soil Board, as it once was, and then a Streamcare catchment group.

My interest in natural resource management has been over a long period of time, so for that reason I was very pleased to be able to take a place on this very active committee, which is very ably led by the member for Ashford, who does a wonderful job chairing it. It is a hardworking committee, and I give credit to our two supporting staff, Mr Patrick Dupont and Mr David Trebilcock. David is about to leave us after his contract expires, and he has chosen to move on to other things. Patrick, of course, will stay with us, and we will be looking very soon for a replacement for David.

Most recently, the committee ventured to Kangaroo Island on one of its field trips. It was the first field trip that has officially been undertaken by the committee since I became a member, and it was a wonderful visit. I had only been to Kangaroo Island once before in my life, in fact, and it was good to take the time over a few days to have a look around, talk to the locals, and see firsthand what is going on there. We were ably hosted by the NRM Board on Kangaroo Island. We were hosted at Flinders Chase National Park by the department. They are very proud of the work they do, and so they should be; it is a much sought-after destination, and understandably so.

On the final day, we ventured back east and spoke to a few of the farmers. Of course, my background is in primary production, and it is always at the forefront of my thinking. I can see that for the primary producers on KI a sustainable environment and sustainable landscape are paramount to their productive capacity and their long-term viability. That is self-evident in what is a really productive part of the state.

As part of this report, 14 separate reports have been tabled over the previous year—an exceedingly high work rate, I would suggest—and one site visit. In fact, even though I was not a member at the time, I was involved in that site visit to Whyalla and the Arrium site at Iron Duke. A couple of my constituents border that mine and had some concerns about the operation there. I can safely say that those concerns were duly investigated and duly dealt with, no doubt due in no small part to the work of that committee, and it was a pleasure to be involved with that.

Another big involvement I had with the committee prior to joining was through the Eyre Peninsula water supply. When I first approached the committee with a view to convincing them—or cajoling them, really—into undertaking an inquiry, I do not think they were quite sure what they had let themselves in for, but they know now. It was a huge task, but I have to say congratulations and thank you for the work that the committee did on that.

There were 12 very good recommendations that came from that; not all were considered by the minister, but we will deal with that at another time because as the house would be aware, I have a motion to address that tabled for 4 December, so we will get to that in due course. They were very good recommendations, and the committee did their very best to accommodate everyone in that inquiry. I think that is the real value of a standing committee. A standing committee obviously has representatives from both sides of the parliament, and even the crossbenchers in the upper house, because it is a combined upper house/lower house committee. We work in a truly bipartisan way with a common goal in mind.

We have another inquiry going on at the moment. We are taking evidence with regard to fishing and aquaculture, and we have taken evidence in recent weeks. What I really like about it is that it gives everybody the opportunity to present a point of view, a perspective, an opinion, and some facts are occasionally thrown in there as well.

It is then our job as a committee to sort through that and come up with a recommendation. It is not always easy, but at least we give everybody the opportunity. If they do not take the opportunity, it is their own fault. We need to back it up with science always, of course. We try to get a balanced opinion from various departmental people and also, occasionally, from those with a scientific background, such as the CSIRO.

This is a great committee. As I said, I have only just joined, but I am really looking forward to my time on the committee. Many of the inquiries, undertakings and discussions we have will be very closely related to the electorate I represent, not just because of geography but also because my electorate of Flinders is very much based on primary production, agriculture, aquaculture, seafood and fishing. That sustainable environment is so critical to ensuring the long-term viability of those industries.

As an aside, most recently we took evidence from the Spencer Gulf prawn industry, and the minister and I attended a function with them yesterday.

The Hon. L.W.K. Bignell: Great people.

Mr TRELOAR: They are great people, and they have a vibrant fishing sector that is really well managed. It is actively managed with good baseline data, and it is an example for a whole lot of fisheries. We had an excellent presentation from Simon Clark, their chief executive.

At the same time, we also took evidence from the Gulf St Vincent prawn fishery, which has been in recess for the last couple of years. I understand that they are going fishing again this month, November, for the first time in two years. They are not even doing a survey; they are just going to go out and go fishing, so it will be interesting. We are all watching with great interest to see where they go fishing, for a start, and see what they come back with.

Mr Williams interjecting:

Mr TRELOAR: It is not as simple as that, member for MacKillop. You need to know where the fish are. That is the thing.

Mr Williams: The secret!

Mr TRELOAR: That is the secret, isn't it? It is not something I have ever known really.

Mr Williams: There are a lot of fish in there, but there is a lot more water between them.

Mr TRELOAR: There it is, yes.

Members interjecting:

Mr TRELOAR: There is a fair bit of interjection going on here, Acting Speaker.

The ACTING SPEAKER (Ms Hildyard): Order!

Mr TRELOAR: I appreciate that it is all in good jest. We are all part-time—

Mr Gardner: Kick them out!

The ACTING SPEAKER (Ms Hildyard): Order!

Mr TRELOAR: —one-time fishermen, I am sure.

Mr Gardner: Send them all out!

The ACTING SPEAKER (Ms Hildyard): Member for Morialta, I am in charge.

Mr TRELOAR: I will be particularly interested to see if any of the Gulf St Vincent prawn fishers venture down to Backstairs Passage because my sense is that it is worth a shot, to use prawn speak. I know there have been prawns caught in the past—quite big prawns—but a good fisherman never tells where he catches his fish. If it is successful, they will tell us that it has been but not tell us any more than that.

Aquaculture, of course, is something we will be looking at in the next little while. This is another subject very close to my heart because I believe there are great opportunities for aquaculture in this state, with this fantastic and extensive coastline we have. There will be opportunities, not just with the species we are currently farming but probably with some new species as well. With that, I support the committee's report and look forward to working on that committee in the coming 12 months.

Mr WILLIAMS (MacKillop) (11:38): I rise to support the motion to note the 99th report of the Natural Resources Committee. In doing so, I want to bring one matter to the notice of the house, a matter which has been concerning me, in the south-east of the state. I note that the committee in its annual report highlights the reports it has made during the year, and one of the series of statutory obligations the committee has is to vet or to look at the various natural resources management boards and the setting of the levies in the various areas across the state.

I want to bring a matter to the attention of the house because I think the South East Natural Resources Management Board has made a serious error, albeit at the behest, I believe, of its minister (the minister in another place). It came to my attention quite recently that, in the South-East, there has been what the government would call the establishment of a citizens' jury to look into a matter of public policy.

The matter of public policy concerns another bill that has been in the house in the last parliament. It has not been brought back to either house in this parliament. It was known as the SEDSOM Bill (the South East Drainage System Operation and Management Bill), which would repeal and replace the South Eastern Water Conservation and Drainage Act.

There are two principal differences in the new bill that was tabled in the last parliament, one being that the three currently elected members of that board would be appointed like the other members of the board. It is partly made up of elected landholder members and partly made up of ministerial appointees. The bill would change that so that all the members were appointed.

The other significant change, if that bill was adopted by the parliament, would be to give the powers to impose a new tax across the South-East to cover the cost of operation and maintenance of the drainage system. The current numbers predict that something like $6 million a year would be raised out of the South-East.

The reason I am talking about this now is that the South East Natural Resources Management Board is funding this citizens' jury. The minister has instructed, in my opinion, the South East Natural Resources Management Board to utilise a portion of the funds that are raised through a levy on the South-East community, specifically to undertake natural resource management activities, to actually fund a political exercise to try to market and curry favour with some people to try to get some people to support the imposition of another levy on the same people in the South-East for another purpose.

I can tell the house that, in the last parliament, the other place, the upper house, refused to accept that proposition of the government. I can inform the house that, to my understanding of the make-up of the other place post the March election, I do not think the numbers have changed, and I think I can pretty well guarantee that the upper house will not accept the imposition of a new tax on the South-East. I do not think that is going to be acceptable, and I think this is an absolute waste of money.

It is costing, at the bare minimum, $140,000. The consultancy company that has been given the task of undertaking this citizens' jury work indicates on its website that it sees the cost as being $140,000. My understanding is that the South East Natural Resources Management Board has indeed set aside $300,000 for this exercise.

Members of this committee will understand that, when the various natural resources management boards come before the committee, they set out their program for the forthcoming year, the costs and their budget to justify the levy rate that they want to set. I certainly have not been able to obtain information about what part of their budget and what programs have been set aside, delayed, deferred, postponed or cancelled to fund this cost of up to $300,000.

I bring that to the attention of both the house and the committee because it is something about which I think some serious questions should be asked of the South East Natural Resources Management Board next year when they come before the committee. I would strongly urge the members of the committee to question that particular board if they are going to behave in that way, extracting money from the community ostensibly to undertake natural resource management activities.

You can go anywhere in my constituency and the members of the community will tell you that they are tearing their hair out with the spread of declared weeds and vertebrate pests, and they do not believe that the South East Natural Resources Management Board is doing a very good job in that area at least. There are plenty of other tasks for that board to undertake in the region and I think that they have seriously erred in applying these funds to what is nothing other than a political exercise. I would like the committee in its deliberations next year to take that into consideration and, indeed, suggest to the South East Natural Resources Management Board that if they can afford to carry out those sort of exercises with the money that they have available to them, they have too much money.

Mr PEDERICK (Hammond) (11:45): I rise to make a contribution to the 99th report of the Natural Resources Committee, that is, the annual report July 2013 to June 2014. I note that, apart from going through the natural resources management boards' levy proposals right across the state, there were some fact-finding missions at Whyalla, issues around bushfire preparedness of properties in bushfire risk areas, discussion around prescribed burning and fire management in the Mount Lofty Ranges, Upper South-East dryland salinity and flood management, visits to the APY lands were proposed and there was debate about that, and the Eyre Peninsula water supply final report.

As I mentioned in this place before, I will declare an interest here. My wife, as an environmental scientist, was involved in the integrated natural resource management sector when it was first initiated in the state and I share some of her frustrations in the amount of reporting that has to be done by legislation. The sooner that the 2004 NRM Act can be amended to make it better for everyone, it will be better for the whole state.

NRM boards do a lot of good work, but there is frustration in the community that a lot of it is done around making sure that the reporting is up to speed with reports that have to be redone every five years or every three years or whatever the time may be. As the member for MacKillop indicated, there is a frustration across the state, and certainly throughout my electorate, with regard to vertebrate pests and weeds.

I think weed and roadside weed management is one that gets brought to my attention many times and it seems to be it is a 'take all' policy by many farmers just because of the size of their properties and the management around weeds on the roadsides. If they can get the end of a boom sprayer in there that is what they will use, so you basically take everything out. That is not good in all areas, especially if someone has some plant life or young trees that they want to establish, so then it becomes a bigger job to manage around these areas. It certainly is an issue that does get harder as there are fewer owners of properties, as farm sizes get bigger and there is less time for people to devote to these tasks, but I certainly note with interest the issue around prescribed burning.

I have spoken in this place many times around prescribed burning and the issues that have come with that. I think prescribed burning is a great tool to keep down fuel loads if managed correctly, and this is the key point. If it is managed correctly it can be a great thing, but the problem we have seen over the years—and I raised this with minister Hunter from the other place during estimates—is that a lot of these prescribed burns, which are supposed to be controlled, get out of control.

Mr Treloar: Who is going to fight them?

Mr PEDERICK: Yes, and that is the other point. The member for Flinders raises a good point: who is going to fight them, especially on Eyre Peninsula? Because of the outrageous rises in the emergency services levy there are more and more brigades that are now saying they will not fight fire on government land, yet we had a minister in this place yesterday interject and say, 'Oh, we have got our own firefighters.' The minister needs to have a look because, last time I looked, firefighters who work for the department of environment—and I do not want to besmirch their name—knock off at 5 o'clock and the fire is still burning. That is when the volunteers really come into play, as they would have for the rest of the day anyway, if they are at the fire front.

We have certainly seen parks like Messent in the South-East or in the Gawler Ranges over on Eyre Peninsula where prescribed burns have got way out of control and overachieved. When I say 'overachieved', that is not a good thing. That means that instead of perhaps burning a third or a quarter of the area that the department wanted to burn, they have managed to burn two-thirds or three-quarters, so you would hardly call that a controlled burn.

In all seriousness, I think there is a real issue now with the emergency services levy debate around who will fight these fires. I would not blame CFS brigades for sitting on the edge of a park, whether it is on Eyre Peninsula around the Gawler Ranges or down around Messent near Keith or the Ngarkat park, or even for the few remnants that were not burnt in Billiatt in the last big fire in recent times. I would not blame both farmers and CFS for sitting in the adjoining land and fighting it as it got to them. I certainly acknowledge that breaks should be ploughed and everything should be done on the private property to prevent it from going further.

In regard to burning, it is about natural resources management but it is also heavily related to controlling park fires. There is a situation that I have mentioned in this place before. Nearly nine years ago there was a fire in the Ngarkat park and it was heading towards the grazing and farming land to the north of the park. This was going to come out at around 100 km/h, if not more, so the people of the fire front said, 'We need to back-burn because it is going to come out and hit us anyway.'

It seemed that no-one had the gumption or the courage to light the fire or they did not get the instruction from further up because, instead of doing a back-burn, which would have been highly sensible because that part of the park was going to burn anyway, the defence line was made at the Mallee Highway. If you have a high wind, a highway is not going to stop a fire, not by any means, and that is not to think about the thousands of acres of land that are going to be burnt before it gets to there and the risk to farmers' built assets—homes, sheds, etc.

Guess what happened? That afternoon, the fire came out and, thankfully, it was managed quite well before it burnt too much pasture land. There does need to be some sense around prescribed burning. It does need to be controlled and people do need to understand that they are covered by at least two acts of legislation if they do a burn-back during a fire period to save other property. I think this is a problem that has not been well orchestrated throughout the community, whether it is in volunteer ranks or elsewhere, because people are spooked by the Native Vegetation Council. I think they have a lot to answer for in this, because we need to protect people's livelihoods and their homes.

In saying that, I commend the report. I think there is endless work the Natural Resources Committee can be involved in. Certainly, in recent times, they have been involved in my electorate with issues around the River Murray and I commend the work that was done there. The Presiding Member of the committee always makes sure that local members are involved and I appreciate that every time. It is a great functioning committee and, as we see water flows slowing down into the River Murray at the moment, we need to keep our eye on that and make sure that, into the future, all the ideals of the Murray-Darling Basin Plan are implemented not just for the sake of this generation but for future generations through this state.

So, I do commend the work of the Natural Resources Committee. I know there is some debate about levy rates, and that will always go on—especially the ones that get proposed above CPI. I note that in regard to natural resources management there is also plenty of room for improvement on the ground around the state on how we manage our resources.

The Hon. S.W. KEY (Ashford) (11:55): I would like to thank all the members for their contribution, both members on the committee and previous members of the committee. Our reports are very much part of active debate in this chamber, and I think that is really important.

I would particularly thank the staff: Patrick Dupont, our Executive Officer, and also David Trebilcock, our Research Officer. We are very sad that David Trebilcock will be finishing up at the end of the year as both of his two-year contracts are over so, sadly, he needs to depart from the committee. However, I would just like to put on record the fantastic work he has done. The produce he has come up with has been astounding, and we really appreciate the dedication and time he has put into the committee. I commend the report to the house.

Motion carried.

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