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Legislative Council - Fifty-First Parliament, Third Session (51-3)
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Parliamentary Committees

NATURAL RESOURCES COMMITTEE: DEEP CREEK

Adjourned debate on motion of Hon. R.P. Wortley:

That the report of the committee on Deep Creek Revisited: A Search for Straight Answers be noted.

(Continued from 24 September 2008. Page 169.)

The Hon. SANDRA KANCK (17:22): I have circulated an amendment, which I move:

That after the words 'be noted' insert the words 'that this council condemns those officers of the Department of Water, Land and Biodiversity Conservation who either misled the committee, and therefore the parliament, or who failed to provide requested information to the committee.

I have been serving on standing committees of this parliament for almost 15 years and have never seen a report like this one that we are noting.

I have spent eight years on the Social Development Committee, three years on the Environment, Resources and Development Committee and five years on the Natural Resources Committee. I have not seen a report like this, nor up until this time have I felt the need to be involved in putting together a report such as this, because on no other committee have I ever met this sort of attitude and intransigence from departmental officers. The report has just one finding, which states:

Some of the information provided to it by officers of DWLBC in the course of its Deep Creek inquiry appears to be false or misleading.

That is an extraordinary finding, but it is one that became necessary for the committee because of the incredibly stupid and arrogant behaviour of certain officers in the Department of Water, Land and Biodiversity Conservation. Much of the actual report deals with evidence taken by the committee on 1, 8 and 9 May 2008 and some correspondence with the department subsequent to those meetings. Particular officers are quoted in the report as a consequence of their style of answering and often deflecting questions from the committee.

One name that stands out in this regard is Mr Darryl Harvey, principal policy officer of DWLBC. The meeting on 1 May received coverage in The Advertiser, and I think that coverage alerted the then chief executive of DWLBC, Mr Robert Freeman, that something was happening. He attended the meetings on 8 and 9 May and he asked that all communications seeking information on this particular matter be addressed in the first instance to him so that he could ensure that the matters were addressed and the information which the committee was seeking was provided. However, in the end he, too, failed to provide information. He has now departed DWLBC and South Australia as part of his career advancement. As they say in the TV ads, 'But wait, there's more!' Those two were not the only employees who should be given this ignominious recognition. I intend that the performance and statement of others are also drawn to the attention of this parliament.

There is a bit of history in the way in which DWLBC has treated the Natural Resources Committee. It has treated it in a manner that could only be described as patronising at best. In June 2005 I moved the matter of the drying of parts of Deep Creek to the Natural Resources Committee. It was carried in this place on 5 July. The committee received that reference and advertised for submissions, and the combined agencies of government lodged a submission (which was dated 14 October 2005) with the committee. As a result of other pressures on committee members, the committee was not able to deal with it before the end of the year, and it was obvious by the end of November that most members of the committee were going to be spending the next three or four months campaigning for the upcoming state election and that we were not going to be able to deal with the reference, although we had received quite a number of submissions.

When the committee reconvened after the March election with a new committee, I pressured members of the committee to take up that reference—to which they agreed. In October 2006 the committee determined that it would seek a briefing from departmental officers, basically to support the submission they had lodged in October 2005. As a committee we readvertised the reference and sought submissions from the public, once again. On 14 March 2007 the combined agencies appeared before the committee. Clearly, they were so dismissive of the reference that they had made no attempt to put a new submission together or a supplementary report, despite the fact that the one submission we had was by that stage 17 months old and despite the fact that the evidence they gave to us was showing that this was a moveable feast and, quite clearly, things they had said in October 2005 had altered during that time.

The fact that they did not even bother to come up with a supplementary report to the committee at that point was the first demonstration, I felt, of the arrogance they were demonstrating towards the committee. The Hansard itself demonstrates the difficulty we had in March 2007 in getting a straight answer. John Rau is the Presiding Member and he attempted to obtain some facts. On page 3 of the evidence he said:

I have read the paper—and I may have misunderstood it. Is this a fair summary: you identified various factors which are known generally to affect a water catchment, for example, clearance of land, damming of streams which supply the main stream, and so forth, and you can draw general conclusions about what the impact of those changes might be from knowledge of other places, but you are unable to provide us with anything more than speculation as to the exact consequences of the interrelationship of a number of those known factors in this environment?

There were attempts to answer it—very poor, I might say—and on page 4 the Presiding Member said:

I have read the submission and I have been re-reading it to try to understand what is coming out of it. I do not know whether it is me or the report, but I do not understand what you are saying are the pinpointed causes and the cause and effect relationship which I think many members of the committee would like to know about.

So, we had some more attempts by the officers of DWLBC to provide an answer, and on page 5 we again have the presiding officer, Mr Rau, saying:

Does that not bring us back to my first question? Given the level of give and take in all these things and the number of unknowns in the equation, the truth of it is that all you are able to offer us (and this is not a criticism of you, because you can only work with the data that you have at your disposal) is an educated guess as to what is going on down there?

Finally, we get an answer after three pages of badgering:

MR HARVEY: Yes.

That in itself is an interesting answer, when one looks at the answers given by Mr Harvey on 1, 8 and 9 May this year. He did give a straight answer there which basically said, 'We can't tell,' but it took three pages of questioning by the Presiding Member of the committee to get Mr Harvey to that point where he indicated that there was a great deal of uncertainty.

I asked a question about information the department had on hand about the impact of forestry plantings on convergent topography. This is on page 26 of this evidence on that day in March 2007. You will note the determination by Mr Harvey to not answer. I said:

Perhaps the DWLBC people could tell us whether they have come up with anything about convergent topography and the impact on plantings, or vice versa.

MR HARVEY: It is a position that has been explored in New South Wales.

I interpose here to draw attention to the fact that later on I will be talking about a report that had been commissioned by DWLBC here in South Australia. Mr Harvey continued:

My understanding is that it has more relevance with respect to some soil types than others. We have just been involved in some work in looking at determining setback widths. Some study has been undertaken, and that was reviewed independently. The approach we are taking does not pursue the converging line of theory; it takes on another position of water balance. Those findings have only just occurred, and how we handle those findings has yet to be finalised.

Those findings for the members of the committee were around about October 2006, so they had not just occurred. I asked:

So, there is a paper available?

MR HARVEY: There is no paper available other than the technical report that we have reviewed, but we do not have a published paper on that at this point.

I asked:

There is nothing you can provide us with?

MR HARVEY: I do not think we can provide you at this time. However we are reviewing this and, as Detlov mentioned, the issue of departmental guidelines is on the agenda to be reviewed.

I asked:

Have you explored any other literature as regards convergent topography?

MR ROBERTSON: There was quite an extensive piece of work done, and I cannot make comment on it, because I was not directly involved in it. I am just aware of the fact that it has been reviewed and it was considered not necessarily appropriate—

I asked:

Who reviewed it?

MR ROBERTSON: Some people within our department.

I responded:

There must be a paper somewhere that they have written, surely.

Mr ROBERTSON: I cannot answer that. I know the outcome was they did not feel it was useful in our environment, in South Australia.

That is a peculiar answer, given that it was a study undertaken in South Australia. I then said:

Would you please go back to your department and find out who did that? I am sure they did not just send an email to the minister and say, 'We don't need to take into account convergent topography', and leave it at that. There must have been a paper; there must have been a review of the literature. There must have been something that was done that allowed them to come to that conclusion and make such a recommendation, and I would like that to be provided to the committee, please.

MR ROBERTSON: We can take that on notice.

So, according to Mr Harvey it was a study, not a paper and then it was nothing more than a technical report. That answer given was evasive enough to make me prick up my ears, and I put in an FOI application on that, but I will talk a little more about that later.

Officers presenting at that hearing were scornful of the local land-holders' information by saying it was merely anecdotal; this was information that the creek in the Foggy Farm catchment had always flowed all year round. They told us it was just anecdotal. The chair implored them to come back with some information if they wanted to, to counter what this 'anecdotal' information was saying. I cannot find that particular quote at the moment: I seem to be on the wrong page. I can assure you that there was an initial request from Mr Rau to have the scientific information, if officers themselves believed that the information that we had been given was merely anecdotal.

Right at the very end, when the departmental officers had completed their presentation, John Rau as Presiding Member (although I cannot find the first quote right now) made a second attempt to encourage them to provide information. He said:

In closing, may I reiterate my earlier statement that it would strengthen the agency's positions if the committee had factual material to work with. During our site visit this Friday we will be presented with a lot of anecdotal material and it may be that it will be supported by what we will see and by individual records kept by farmers. This will be all quite difficult for us to ignore, and I think it would be in your best interests to provide us with as much scientific and evidentiary material as you possibly can.

I will observe that, despite that, those officers failed to provide us with that information. They told us that those farmers who had lived in the area for years, and who were quite confident having lived there for years, were wrong in saying that every year the Foggy Farm Creek had run until 1992, shortly after forestry plantations, and it was somehow a figment of their imagination. But they did not at any stage, despite the fact that they undertook to do so, provide us with the information that we requested. There were a number of requests for information in that meeting that the officers told us would result in our receiving information and, ultimately, that information never appeared.

The report that we are noting, that is, 'A search for straight answers', observes the documents obtained by me under the Freedom of Information Act. I tabled a complete set of those documents and they were probably about 5 or 6 centimetres in thickness. That information was gained as a consequence of the very evasive answer that Mr Harvey had given to me to my question about convergent zones—that it was not a paper but a technical report, and so on, and that it would not be of any value to us, either.

Those documents revealed something very interesting. They revealed that Mr Michael Deering, who was sitting right next to Mr Harvey while Mr Harvey was saying there was a document but he could not tell us much about it, had been involved in the commissioning of that report. He was sitting right next to him and did not open his mouth about it. He did not say a word. He did not say he knew anything about it or anything about the contents of it. I think that was extremely underhanded of Mr Deering, to simply sit there and say nothing.

I said that I was going to name people other than those in the particular report we are noting, and Mr Deering is one of those people. Nevertheless, the committee ultimately got its hands on a copy, mainly because somewhere along the line someone was able to give our committee secretary a little more information about it and he was able to specifically ask for a copy of that paper. But it was not given to us willingly.

That was a very substantial report entitled 'Fleurieu Peninsula Swamp Ecology, Swamp Hydrology and Hydrological Buffers' by Casanova and Zhang. The reason those providing evidence that day played cagey and the reason they basically rejected the conclusions and recommendations that Zhang and Casanova came up with was that it effectively validated the position that the Natural Resources Committee would go on to take about this area. They certainly did not want us to have a document that was going to validate that position.

The committee reported on 19 June 2007 and recommendation 8 was:

Forestry SA remove portions of the Foggy Farm plantations to maintain permanent buffers in the hydrologically effective areas of between 20 and 100 metres either side of the Foggy Farm tributaries.

Minister Gago responded, as she is required to do by statute, rejecting that recommendation, and here is what she had to say in her written response:

Government considers the impact of rainfall, dams and any further development of forestry areas a more significant issue than the removal of plantation area.

She patronisingly went on to state:

The committee appears to not have considered the technical advice from the agencies and the official rainfall record that indicates lower levels of observed rainfall since 1991.

This furphy about the rainfall was present from the start of our dealings with the government agencies, and the report we are noting today and the earlier one tabled in June last year dealt with it.

Rather than the committee failing to consider the advice given to it, the committee looked at the advice, analysed it against other information and found what the agencies had told us was wanting. To paraphrase the minister, it would appear that the minister has not properly read our July 2007 report. If she had, she would have read the following quote:

Deep Creek ceased flowing in the summer of 1992, the year in which the highest ever reading of 1,183 mm was recorded, and two high (1,000 mm-plus) consecutive rainfall readings were also observed for the period 2001-02, yet the creek has still failed to retain a summer flow for increasingly longer periods throughout the progression of years since 1992.

Had the then minister done her homework and read the report, she might have questioned the advice given to her by her officers. Continuing with the minister's far from adequate response to the committee, she says:

The committee suggests that there has been a change in the botanical structure of native vegetation, and this has only occurred since the development of the pine plantation.

Yes, we most certainly did, and this 'change in the botanical structure' is bureaucratese for 'dead and dying'.

I spoke optimistically in this chamber following the tabling of our first report, and I was bitterly disappointed by the minister's response to the committee. So, I asked questions in parliament on 15 November 2007, one of which was:

Given that the minister claims that there is 'no scientific evidence' that the Upper Deep Creek catchment was a perennial stream, how does she account for the existence of the Foggy Farm swamp? Is she aware of any scientific evidence of swamps forming and existing without an all-year round supply of water? Will the minister advise the parliament how many years it takes for a swamp to become a climax ecosystem?

Anyone who has done a little bit of high school science would know that you cannot have a swamp, with all the plants associated with that swamp, without a year-round supply of water. Unsurprisingly—because, obviously, she was going to justify her position—the minister in reply to that simply trotted out again the inaccurate information given to her by her officers about declining rainfall.

The committee was not happy with the minister's response and the way in which the committee's recommendations and intentions had been twisted by those who had prepared that response, so we decided to pursue its authors. We asked for departmental officers to again appear before the committee. When they did, early in May this year, they were unapologetic, again, to the point of arrogance. Some of them attempted to debate with the chair rather than answer the questions put to them. I seek leave to conclude my remarks later.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.

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