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House of Assembly - Fifty-Third Parliament, Second Session (53-2)
2016-04-13 Daily Xml
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Local Government (Stormwater Management Agreement) Amendment Bill

Second Reading

Adjourned debate on second reading.

(Continued from 23 March 2016.)

Ms CHAPMAN (Bragg—Deputy Leader of the Opposition) (12:10): It is with great pleasure that I stand to speak on the Local Government (Stormwater Management Agreement) Amendment Bill 2016. The opposition's position is that we will be supporting the bill. One of the most significant issues to be dealt with by the stormwater management teams is to sort out who is going to be responsible for the pipes and sewerage under the ground in metropolitan Adelaide.

What has happened historically is that nobody has taken responsibility for stormwater and, for the entire time I have been in the parliament, for example, we have had water rushing off the hills of Bragg down onto the plains, terrorising the people of Unley, and flushing into the area of West Torrens and almost drowning the constituents of the Treasurer.

Brownhill and Keswick Creek are branches of water which flow through the Mitcham hills and provide the lifeblood of a beautiful environment in those valleys. They flow down, some is captured through the bottom of the Glenside Hospital precinct into a stormwater catchment area under Greenhill Road, some of it travels under the old Victoria Park racecourse. There are some natural detention basins there which former departmental and Adelaide City Council personnel have been working together on to try to improve the catchment.

Unfortunately, through the ministers we have had who have tried to deal with this matter—and I remember the Hon. Trish White grappled with this at one stage. She wanted to issue regulations for people in the Unley district who were being flooded as a result of not being able to capture this water adequately. She tried to introduce some regulations to make it more difficult for landowners to have any complaint about this, and it was their fault if they built their houses 150 years ago through the creek lines and if the backs of houses through Unley were being flooded.

The state government's answer to all of this has been that we will establish a stormwater management authority, and some fairly eminent people have been appointed to this body over the time. It was worked on the basis that nobody was legally responsible for the infrastructure of these assets that had been built and managed historically by the SA Water Corporation, prior to that the Engineering and Water Service entities which were then government owned entities. Now they are independently corporate, whatever that means these days.

In any event, they established an authority which said that for the development of infrastructure in the future to deal with stormwater, we will have a system where it will be that we will put up a project, we will work out what we are going to do, and we will ask the federal government to put in a third, the state government to put in a third and the local government to put in a third.

We, out in Bragg—dealing with the valley that I have just talked about in the Brownhill Keswick Creek area, which is in desperate need of attention—went through the painstaking exercise through our local council of working out if we had an infrastructure solution to the stormwater problem. Our council would put in 4 per cent. Unley council, West Torrens council, Adelaide City Council and others were going to put in a lot more, depending on whether they were going to be a beneficiary of the water or whether they were going to need protection from the water for their constituents. This had been going on for 10 or 12 years now with report after report about what is to be done.

The member for Waite was involved in this. He sat on the fence most of the time and he really did not want to do anything in line with a number of recommendations which were to establish a dam, or multiple dams, in the Mitcham Hills catchment area so that we could slow down the flow in a major weather event and minimise the damage. Furthermore, which I thought was quite a good idea, it would give us an opportunity to capture this excess water before it rushed through and wrecked all the houses down in the Treasurer's electorate and washed them almost out to sea.

We were quite happy to work with a number of these options, but each time a proposal was put up, someone would complain about it—usually the member for Waite and his council, because they did not want to have any dams or detention basin facilities up in the Mitcham area. A number of alternative stormwater project options were put forward, including expanding the culverts through the Unley area, which brought some concern from residents in that area. Nevertheless, some other options were put up.

I just want to place on the record that, at all material times, the Burnside council has been ready, willing and able to participate in the opportunities for catchment and a contribution ongoing towards the infrastructure costs of whatever model is finally resolved, which have gone from about $100 million to $160 million for the options that have been considered over this period of time. Nevertheless, it still needs attention and we are always willing to deal with it.

One of the things I have presented to the government, which at this stage has had no response, is that, in whatever program is facilitated, we should expand the detention basin area in the north-west corner of the Glenside Hospital site (which is already a depressed area) for the purposes of catching water in a major water event, increase the culvert access under Greenhill Road, increase the detention basin underground capacity in the south-east corner of the Parklands (which no longer has the starting gates for the straight of the Victoria Park racecourse above it, but is now a wetlands area) and divert a significant amount of water.

I think I even had the Adelaide City Council onside with that option. They in the meantime had signed up with the state government to buy a whole lot of 'purple pipe' water, which was treated water being pumped up from the Glenelg treatment plant. That is pretty expensive water for reasons we will not go into today. It does give us a chance to divert water when we have these major events and to ensure that we do not just treat stormwater as a dangerous instrument and quite highly destructive to infrastructure, housing and even people's lives if it all comes down at once, but we have infrastructure improvements that give it the momentum to enable it to be actually used.

We had a major event in the Waterfall Gully area in about 2005-06 is my recollection. We had a one in 1,000-year flood. It was a disaster as far as expense went for the people along Waterfall Gully Road. I had announcements by the then premier saying, 'This is a great concern and Burnside council have got a lot to answer for.'

In fact, they then realised, via minister Conlon of the day, that in fact it was their road, their gully, their water, their park and their rocks that came crashing down into Waterfall Gully and they were responsible for cleaning it up. With red faces, they did in fact acknowledge that and did send up trucks, one after another, to rebuild the road and take out 11,000 tons of rock that had come rushing down that gully.

So we understand how highly destructive stormwater can be, but on this side of the house we also understand the importance of capturing it and using it before it rushes out to sea and kills all that seagrass in Gulf St Vincent, and becomes a danger both on land and in the ocean. We will be supporting this bill, and the member for Morphett will admirably go through the detail of it.

Dr McFETRIDGE (Morphett) (12:20): In 2003, as a relatively new member of this place, I was out, I think, at about half past four in the morning helping the good people of Glenelg North clean up after devastating floods in the Glenelg North area when the systems at the Patawalonga failed and all the stormwater came down through Brownhill Creek, Sturt Creek and the airport drain and met in the Pat. The lock gates did not work and the Pat overflowed, and hundreds of homes were severely damaged by stormwater. In fact I have vivid memories of catching a fish about three streets back from the Pat in one of the hollows in the drains there, once the floodwaters had subsided.

So for me, this issue of flooding in the metropolitan area is one that is very real, and my constituents in Morphett are very concerned about what their fellow South Australians are doing upstream to control the water. We know that as we have urban infill occurring more and more, open ground is being covered by houses and concrete and bitumen, and when the rain comes the stormwater has to go somewhere. It all flows downhill and it is all going to end up in the sea, and it is going to end up in and around my electorate of Morphett if we do not manage it in a very sensible way.

The engineering involved is expensive. It is something that we cannot avoid, though, because we do live in the flattest capital city in Australia. The flood maps around the metropolitan area are quite alarming to see, the depths of floodwater you get in some of the inner suburbs and around the Wayville showgrounds and Unley. You see the flooding in the Parklands every time there is heavy rain, and in the South Parklands there are hold-ups because of flooding. That is just the tip of the iceberg. If we see some serious rain events we are in deep, deep trouble here. Houses in some council areas have to be built above the flood levels now because the councils are aware that this is an issue that will continue.

The bill we are discussing today amends the Local Government Act 1999. However, I have some concerns because we still have the South-Western Suburbs Drainage Act 1959 to 1970 in the statute book. I am not a lawyer, but I assume that because this is still on the statutes this legislation is still in force. It refers to the building of drainage works in the south-western suburbs, and it refers to the municipal councils of Marion, Mitcham, West Torrens, Unley, Brighton and Glenelg, and the district councils of Meadows and Stirling. We know that most of those do not exist anymore, so what is the particular legal status of this legislation?

Back in those days—1959 to 1970, which this act refers to—the issue of flooding was alive and well. We see in the act, in section 3, that the minister (meaning the Minister for Local Government) can undertake works in and around the Patawalonga, which means channels, drains, dams; they can dam the Sturt Creek, they can do a lot of things. How does this fit in with what we are discussing today?

What we need to come up with today is some definite long-term plan for a long-term problem, because the rain is going to come and the floods are going to come and we are going to have to manage the stormwater. Sure, we have wonderful wetlands around the place, but that will not manage all the stormwater we are seeing. We need to make sure that in the agreements being struck between councils—whether they are in detention or delaying the flow of the stormwater—it is something we need to have very clearly laid out, not just for this place but for the good people of South Australia who are building their homes in and around our suburbs and in those areas where there is potential inundation.

We need to make sure that the agreement we are including in this bill is going to be one that is going to allow the infrastructure that is going to be required that was first mentioned back in the South-Western Suburbs Drainage Act to be enhanced and reengineered so that we are not going to have the 2003 Glenelg floods repeated. We talk about bushfires all the time, but the other hazard we have in the metropolitan area is large-scale damage from flooding.

The people who are involved in those incidents know. In fact, there were a couple of divorces, and I am aware of one suicide, just from that event at Glenelg, as well as the hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of damage that was done and the hours and hours that my office staff and I spent battling with the insurers to try to get the payouts that these people were entitled to in that area. It took years, in some cases, for these people to be compensated for damage which was completely unrelated to their daily goings-on.

We need to make sure that any agreement we are entering into here is fair to all—not only fair to the organisations, the local government and the state government but also to the individuals. This piece of legislation will be reviewed, I am sure, at some stage when the pressures on stormwater re-use and harvesting are looked at.

There is a real need to recognise the fact that we can re-use stormwater and re-use sewerage water in South Australia, which is something we are a long way behind most countries on. We need to make sure that we are aware of the technology that is out there to harvest stormwater and put it into aquifer storage and recovery so we can continue to re-use it.

We have a deplorable situation at the moment where there are still millions and millions of litres of treated water leaving the Glenelg sewerage plant and going out to sea, and who knows what environmental effect that is having now. We did hear that some seagrass is growing back just recently, which is great news, but we are using a very, very small percentage of the treated sewerage water going out of Glenelg, and that is extremely high-quality water that could be used for many other purposes.

We have seen the $60 million Glenelg-Adelaide pipeline put in—the big purple pipe—to take that treated water back up to Adelaide and for people to use it on the way, but what do we see? We see SA Water not just charging a reasonable cost recovery on this: we see them charging 75 per cent of potable price, and I understand that is going to go up to 90 per cent of potable price. So, by the time the councils put in their infrastructure to access that water, why would they? I know why I would like them to, but why would they? Why can't the government see sense on this? Why can't SA Water be told that they will deliver that water, save for cost recovery—and I am sure it is not 90 per cent of potable price—to those people who want to use it on the way?

I personally would like to see that water going up the bit of the Torrens to the headwaters and then coming back down the Torrens, flushing the Torrens all the time, through wetlands, allowing people to take that water off wherever they need to for watering parks and gardens so that that water is not going out to sea. I do not know how the engineering of that would be done and how expensive it would be to do, but I think the environmental impact of what we are doing at the moment is something that cannot continue.

As for stormwater, there again, everybody, right from the individual property owners through to the councils and state government, has a responsibility to retain and re-use that stormwater if they possibly can—detain it on their properties so it can be led off at a slightly slower rate perhaps, so we do not get the flooding and high-flow rates we have seen in the past. We need to make sure that we are thinking with our feet as well as with our wallets on these sorts of things. We need to make sure that we are in step with the latest trends.

Talking about the latest trends, I had the pleasure of going to Singapore a number of years ago to talk to the Singapore Public Utilities Board with Delft Water out of Holland. The then minister for water for South Australia, Karlene Maywald, had been up there looking at some of the agreements that were being signed between Delft Water and Singapore Public Utilities Board, and also the National University of Singapore, about the handling of their stormwater in Singapore.

They have big concrete channels, or had big concrete channels, very similar to the Sturt Creek. After heavy rain, you go down through Elder and Morphett and just watch that water roar down through that concrete channel. That was happening in Singapore. With Flinders University, the Public Utilities Board of Singapore and Delft Water in Holland, they were converting their concrete channels into beautiful riverine parks with greenery; gone were the concrete channels. They have ABC up there—active clean beautiful water. It is an amazing thing to see the technologies there.

I mentioned Flinders University. I should actually emphasise the fact that Flinders University has been working on this gel technology to help filter stormwater, and it is being used overseas. We should be looking at, again, not just steel but all our other homegrown engineering developments here, so that we can make sure that South Australia is the leader in stormwater recycling and sewage recycling.

This agreement today will certainly go some way to hopefully ensuring that my constituents—the good people of Glenelg North and all those between Glenelg North and the top end of the Sturt Creek, Brownhill Creek and Airport Drain—are going to be protected from the threat of flooding, because if it does happen it is going to be a very serious event for us all.

The Hon. S.E. CLOSE (Port Adelaide—Minister for Education and Child Development, Minister for Higher Education and Skills) (12:31): I have listened with great interest to the contributions made by the members opposite and thank them very much for their contributions and their support for this bill. I would like to thank the people involved in preparing the bill and I commend it to the house.

Bill read a second time.

Third Reading

The Hon. S.E. CLOSE (Port Adelaide—Minister for Education and Child Development, Minister for Higher Education and Skills) (12:32): I move:

That this bill be now read a third time.

Bill read a third time and passed.

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