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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, First Session (54-1)
2019-10-29 Daily Xml
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Grievance Debate

Environmental Conservation

Dr CLOSE (Port Adelaide—Deputy Leader of the Opposition) (15:14): I rise to talk about how important it is that we take our natural environment seriously, and therefore how important it is that we have a decent environment minister in this state. Let us briefly run through the challenges that we face as a planet.

Here is the quick primer for you if you are ever asked, 'What's wrong? Why are we worried about the environment?' Number one, if you are under 40 you have never experienced a year that is cooler than the average year temperature of the 20th century. If you are under 34, you have never experienced a month that was cooler than the average of the 20th century temperature. If you are under 18, nearly every year that you have lived has been in the hottest 18 years ever recorded.

What about the natural environment? Not only is it under pressure from climate change but we are also independently seeing the impact of land degradation, land use and pollution. We have one million species that are on the list of heading towards extinction across the planet; that came out in an IPCC report earlier this year. Yesterday—only yesterday—240 Australian environmental scientists wrote to the Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, pleading with him to take the environment seriously because of the collapse of biodiversity in our country.

What kind of environment minister do we have in the face of those very, very serious issues? What kind of environment minister do we have in South Australia? We have a capitulator. We have a person who does not know when to stand and when not to.

The Hon. J.A.W. GARDNER: Point of order: the member is making personal reflections on members.

The SPEAKER: Yes, when we start calling people capitulators. Despite the fact that it is getting a bit tiring and old, I am willing to accept some sort of political argy-bargy and characterisation to a point, but I just want to caution the deputy leader. The deputy leader has the call.

Dr CLOSE: What happened on the River Murray, the most important river system in south-eastern Australia? What happened to the 450 gigalitres that we were promised under the Murray-Darling Basin Plan and promised through water efficiency measures? Under the Murray-Darling Basin Plan, the only socio-economic criterion that needed to be fulfilled was that there was a willing seller, an irrigator who was prepared to say, 'I will put a water efficiency project here, and then you can take the excess water and give it to South Australia for the health of the River Murray.' But, no, the Eastern States did not want that. They wanted to complicate that. They wanted pages and pages of criteria that needed to be agreed to. This minister agreed. This minister was found by a royal commission to have acted against the state's interests.

What about the natural environment in South Australia? Let's take the case study of Flinders Chase. We hear a lot of nonsense about the Flinders Chase development being approved under the Labor government. That is not the case. There was an agreement that we would have a private operator come in and have overnight accommodation in Flinders Chase close to the track. There was an amendment to that management plan that enabled that to happen close to the track. This government has approved over three kilometres of native vegetation in one of the 15 biodiversity hotspots in Australia being cleared so that people who are going to pay nearly $1,000 a night can go into Flinders Chase and be on a clifftop that is completely undisturbed. That is what this government has agreed to.

As a result, the very good people of Kangaroo Island—farmers, businesspeople, environmentalists, artists—have risen up and said, 'This is not good enough. This is not how you treat the valuable asset we have here. Why will people want to come and visit? Why will people want to treasure this if it is being trashed by having native vegetation cleared for the sake of a few people being able to stay in a very special part of the state?' That is why the friends, those beautiful friends of Flinders Chase—they weed, they plant, they collect seeds and they grow them—are on strike. They are not doing that anymore. That breaks their hearts. They want to be in Flinders Chase helping, but they are heartbroken by this minister.

I think we can take what happened with Semaphore as read. The right decision was made in the end—more or less. We still need to ask questions about the impact on Semaphore South. But, if the minister had not written me a letter and said, 'I will not send a departmental person to your public forum'—200 people came—'because it's a waste of valuable departmental time', if this minister did not have that attitude to my community, maybe he would have worked out earlier that we were right and he was wrong. Instead, it took effort from the community. They put it in and I congratulate them.

The last point I want to raise as a question mark is financial responsibility. The minister makes much of, 'We're going to have 20 more rangers—fantastic! We're better than Labor—20 more rangers,' and he has recruited 18 rangers at the same time as allowing eight to take a package. Eight rangers were given money to stop being rangers—nearly $500,000—while 18 were recruited. There was not a single extra dollar in the budget for any of those rangers. Shame! We need better.

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