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House of Assembly - Fifty-Third Parliament, First Session (53-1)
2014-12-04 Daily Xml
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Eyre Peninsula Water Supply

Mr TRELOAR (Flinders) (12:49): I move:

That this house urges the state government to urgently address the impending water supply issues on Eyre Peninsula, with specific reference to the final report and recommendations of the Natural Resources Committee's inquiry into the Eyre Peninsula water supply.

I rise today with just 10 minutes of the parliamentary year to go, really, to discuss this motion, and I know there are other members who would like to take the opportunity to make a contribution. This motion has been a while coming. It is really for me as a local member to keep this particular issue on the agenda, on the parliament's agenda, on the government's agenda.

I am very grateful to the Natural Resources Committee, which undertook a water inquiry throughout most of 2012 and into 2013. They certainly did an extraordinary amount of work, and a lot of that work was outstanding. They finished up producing a report which made 12 recommendations. Those recommendations were quite succinct, quite deliberate, and in the end the majority of them were disregarded by the minister.

Mr Williams: What's new?

Mr TRELOAR: Yes; what's new? Nothing surprising there. It highlighted to this parliament—and it has been spoken about many times before; my predecessor, Mrs Liz Penfold, the member for Flinders for 16 years, spent a lot of time talking about it—the water supply on Eyre Peninsula, the scarcity of the resource and also the quality and delivery of that resource. Nothing has changed.

The recommendations include that the Minister for Sustainability, Environment and Conservation replace flux-based water allocation planning and management with adaptive management. In other words, it uses carefully chosen triggers based on monitoring. The second recommendation was that the Eyre Peninsula's NRM board, SA Water, and DEWNR continue to fill the gaps in knowledge. Something that became quite clear very on in the inquiry was the lack of understanding about the resources. We are talking about underground lenses which are really quite confined, but there are a number of them. The interaction between those lenses was little understood—how they recharge, what the leakage rates were, whether there was movement between lenses or not. I think those questions are still to be answered.

There was also a time when the Ceduna council were very keen on using a private investor to install a desal plant at Denial Bay, which is slightly west of Ceduna. It is an area that the member for Kavel remembers very fondly from his time in the bank at Ceduna. We were only talking about it just prior to this debate. Of course, for Ceduna, being at the far end of the reticulated water supply on Eyre Peninsula, the delivery of that water is really stretched to the limit, and the quality declines by the time it gets so far west.

The Ceduna council, to their credit, decided to take some initiative and look to supplement their water supply, and maybe even offer water more cheaply than what SA Water can by installing a desal plant. Sadly, SA Water did not even have the courtesy to respond to the council's proposal. That project sits in limbo. It is still, as I understand it, under consideration by the council. It is something that they would still like to progress, but they do not have the capacity to do that at the moment.

The fourth recommendation was that the Minister for Sustainability, Environment and Conservation and planning review, the EPA, Planning SA and DEWNR make adjustments to the overlapping jurisdictional responsibilities for water management. I think a big part of the problem is that everybody is very good at blaming everybody else, particularly within government departments. There was a crisis looming during the first decade of the 21st century, because Eyre Peninsula, along with much of eastern Australia, faced low rainfall. It has become known since as the millennium drought. The water level in our basins was falling as a result of a lack of rainfall and also, quite possibly, over pumping by SA Water.

One of the understandings that the board came to was that it was probably a combination of both pumping and a decline in rainfall that led to lower water levels. However, since then, for the most part on Eyre Peninsula we have had six winters in a row of at least average or sometimes better than average rainfalls. We have actually seen an increase in water levels in many of our basins and an improvement in the resource.

That is not to say the urgency has gone out of this, and the reason I say that is due to housing developments, and I will highlight a couple of examples. There is one at Ceduna, known as Ceduna Waters, and one north of Port Lincoln, known as the Point Boston housing development. They are significant developments and quite well supported by investors and people seeking to build a new home and live by the sea. In both of those examples, SA Water either was not able, or not prepared, to provide reticulated water to those expanding housing developments. I think the real risk for Eyre Peninsula is that we will not have the capacity to provide for future growth and development.

There is no doubt that Eyre Peninsula is one of the bright spots in this state as far as economic potential goes. I know that the Premier and cabinet were over there last week and saw the opportunity that is about to come upon us, and I think these basic service utilities need to be in a position where they can cope with that. The Premier has begun to talk about productive infrastructure, and I think there is no greater enabler than water, and the ability of this state to provide water to those who need it and require it, not just for their households but also for their businesses, is critical.

The Tod Reservoir also came up in discussions, and there was a recommendation that DEWNR, the Eyre Peninsula Natural Resources Management Board and SA Water, along with the Lower Eyre Peninsula council, investigate a potential for recommissioning the Tod Reservoir, a much-loved asset on Eyre Peninsula. Of course, it was the initial source of a reticulated supply, but it has been taken off line, mainly as a result of an increase in salinity and some agricultural residues.

I am not sure in my own mind what its future is. The water body is a product of its catchment; it is a product of the landscape around it. Given that it is predominantly an agricultural landscape now, there will always be ongoing problems with salinity and agricultural residues, particularly nitrates. That is not to say that managing this resource so that it can once again become a contributor to the water supply on Eyre Peninsula is beyond the realms of possibility.

It was also recommended that we investigate the key Lower Eyre Peninsula catchments, including Little Swamp and Big Swamp. They are a couple of catchments just outside Port Lincoln, and those areas of higher rainfall and steeper topography, feed into the catchments and, ultimately, result in a contribution to the underground lenses. It was suggested that DMITRE and DEWNR consider locating some of the field operations and water licence management staff on Eyre Peninsula. Of course, centralisation of resources is an issue that all government departments are faced with and, ultimately, it is the country areas that suffer. There is nothing like having people on the ground, I would suggest.

The recommendations go on—really practical recommendations—such as the installation of rain gauges and that active and ongoing monitoring is done on a quarterly basis to ensure allocations are not exceeded. Interestingly, recommendation No. 10 talked about the potential impact of mining and change of land use on the water resource. Obviously, if industry develops—and it may be mining, or it might be increased population, or something different again—the demand on the water resource will be much greater.

The 11th recommendation was that the NRM board and DEWNR consider their proposal to define April 1993 as the full-basin level. Obviously, that was not the full-basin level because extraction had already been occurring for some 50 years by that stage, so levels were down. I understand the need to draw a line in the sand, but there are many within the community who are not particularly happy with this recommendation.

Finally, recommendation 12 is that SA Water decommission its pumps at the Polda Trench. The Polda Basin is adjacent Elliston—in between Elliston and Loch—and a confined and much smaller aquifer than the southern basins. Historically, it has been used to access stock and domestic water for those landowners who sit above the Polda Basin, but since the mid-1960s it was utilised by SA Water to provide water into the reticulated system on Eyre Peninsula. This basin has now declined to such a point where we are no longer able to access water. In fact, some of the landowners have seen their wells go dry. Once again, in the last couple of years we have just seen those water levels come up a bit, so to me, at least, there is an indication that basins can recover given time, and that is what we need to do with Polda. I seek leave to conclude my remarks later.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.

Sitting suspended from 13:00 to 14:00.

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