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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1)
2023-02-09 Daily Xml
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Giles Electorate

Mr HUGHES (Giles) (15:24): I rise today to talk about a number of issues in the electorate of Giles. Before doing so, I want to acknowledge what a historic day it has been in this parliament with the introduction in the upper house of the First Nations Voice Bill 2023. I am not going to reflect upon the nature of the bill—we will all have an opportunity to do that in the coming days and weeks—but it is an incredibly important piece of legislation.

I want to put on the record my acknowledgement of the Attorney-General for the work that he has done and the Commissioner for First Nations Voice, Dale Agius, for the work that he has done, and all the other people who have taken part in this process. In my electorate, I attended one of the consultation sessions with the Aboriginal people who turned up, and it was a productive first session. The way that the commissioner and others have gone about this process is exemplary. They made a real effort to involve as many people as possible and took on board the things that were said.

What I want to primarily talk about today is something that I brought up both during the term of the previous government and during the term of this government, which is the situation up in Coober Pedy. We still have a council that is dismissed. That was something that I supported at the time, and it was the right thing to do. It was an action taken by the Marshall government as a result of a process that was started by Labor, but we still have some way to go to resolve the issues in Coober Pedy.

As the local member, I always come back to some basic principles. One of those principles is a sense of a fair go, that when it comes to access to essential services people in regional communities and remote regional communities are treated no differently from people in Whyalla, Port Augusta or Adelaide. I put on the record time and again that I support parity pricing of water in Coober Pedy. I do not accept that the people of Coober Pedy have to pay up to three times as much for water in their community compared to people in major regional centres covered by SA Water and the metropolitan area.

When you look at Coober Pedy, it is not a rich community. In fact, it is a very poor community. The median personal income in Coober Pedy is $498 a week. Compare that to the state's median personal income of $734 per week. When you look at the median household income in Coober Pedy, it is $761 a week, and in South Australia it is $1,455. You can look at other figures, too, that show what is happening in Coober Pedy. The median age is significantly higher than elsewhere in the state and in Adelaide by some 10 years, which is a reflection of an ageing population in Coober Pedy.

It has been said that, when the transition was going on from a progress association, it was the council itself that took on the water and generating assets at the time, and the electricity distribution and retail, so they have to accept some of the responsibility. When they took that on back in the 1980s, Coober Pedy had a population of over 3,000 people. The population is now roughly half of that. There is always a little bit of an undercount in Coober Pedy, so there is some conjecture about the figures. The capacity of that community to deliver essential services and the capacity of that community to afford expensive water is very limited.

When I was a candidate back in 2014, I went into bat for the community for the reintroduction of parity of grid pricing when it came to electricity, and that is what we need to do with water. It is a basic fair go, it is the delivery of an essential service, and the people of Coober Pedy should not be paying three times as much for water as people elsewhere in this state.

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