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House of Assembly - Fifty-Third Parliament, Second Session (53-2)
2017-02-15 Daily Xml
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Coober Pedy

Mr HUGHES (Giles) (15:31): I rise today to talk about the community of Coober Pedy but, in so doing, I would like to touch on some of the issues that the member for Flinders has raised in relation to electricity security on the Eyre Peninsula. In my previous life before parliament, I used to go fishing a lot down on the West Coast, and power outages were a common occurrence.

The suggestions made by the member for Flinders are, in the main, sensible suggestions. There is a whole raft of technologies now that will enable us to have more secure electricity for those communities on the end of the grid. We need to be seriously looking at a range of options, and two of those options are the development of microgrids and the growth in distributed energy supplies. I am absolutely sure that that will come to pass.

Getting back to Coober Pedy, we have had a few hot days down here in the south, but they do not compare with the run of hot days in the north of the state in communities such as Coober Pedy. Those people who have dugouts are fortunate. As members probably know, a dugout is probably close to being the most thermally efficient form of housing that we have in Australia. It is a form of housing that responds very well to the climatic conditions that are found in Coober Pedy, and it is Coober Pedy's good fortune that the local rock formation is stable and workable.

The principle of building to suit climatic circumstances is something that is generally absent in our state and other states, given our lowest common denominator energy star ratings for houses built over the last decade or so. Spare a thought for those who do not live underground in Coober Pedy, especially during the long, hot days of summer. Our built form has still a way to go before it effectively responds to our climate, but the reward for responding to our climate will be cheaper electricity bills and a reduced environmental impact.

Not everyone lives in a dugout in Coober Pedy, but most people have had access to the swimming pool. The pool is on education department land. It is a combined department and community pool, and the cost of running the pool was shared between the council and the department. Late last year, the council decided to pull funding, putting at risk pool availability during the summer school break. I consider the closure of the pool over the summer school holidays to be unacceptable. There are already limited recreational options, and the closure of the pool in such a hot climate would seriously disadvantage many Coober Pedy residents.

I indicated to the Coober Pedy council CEO that I would attempt to secure interim funding for the summer school holidays to keep the pool open. Securing the funding would also provide an opportunity to negotiate ongoing funding. I made clear that any future funding should be fair to the council and the Coober Pedy community. We did provide the interim funding. I have made it very plain that I was deeply disappointed with the approach of the Coober Pedy council to negotiations, and I have expressed that disappointment publicly. Negotiations are meant to be about give and take, not just take.

On 24 January, the council made clear that it was not going to provide any support for the broader community's use of the pool. We bent over backwards to offer a very fair deal to the council. We offered to pick up all the recurrent costs, including the utilities, cleaning, chemicals and repairs. The only cost that we expected the council to meet was supervision outside school hours. We could have acted like the council and ignored the broader community, which would have meant the pool open during school hours for the use of students. We did not do that. We put the community first and provided funding to enable community use.

I mentioned the dugouts and energy efficiency at the start of the grievance. The electricity source for the Coober Pedy community is about to change, given the progress on the ARENA-supported renewable energy project. EDL are making solid progress on the construction of the hybrid renewable energy system, entailing wind and solar combined with batteries and diesel. To date, Coober Pedy has been almost entirely dependent on diesel.

It is always a challenge when it comes to significant up-front investment and the power purchase agreement to underpin that investment at a time when costs are rapidly falling for solar and batteries. Any approach needs to be seriously thought through so that people are not locked into prices that in years to come might be seen as excessive.

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