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Legislative Council - Fifty-First Parliament, Third Session (51-3)
2008-11-26 Daily Xml
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Parliamentary Committees

NATURAL RESOURCES COMMITTEE: UPPER SOUTH EAST DRYLAND SALINITY AND FLOOD MANAGEMENT ACT

The Hon. R.P. WORTLEY (20:20): I move:

That the 25th report of the committee, on the Upper South-East Dryland Salinity and Flood Management Act, be noted.

The Natural Resources Committee has, since December 2006, been responsible for the oversight of the Upper South-East Dryland Salinity and Flood Management Act 2002. This report relates to committee responsibilities under the act and issues drawn to its attention—in March, October and November 2008 at public hearings, at a site visit in July 2008 and in written submissions from the public.

As members would no doubt be aware, at the time of settlement the South-East region of our state was a very wet place. Early explorers and surveyors who travelled through the region (including South Australia's Surveyor-General George Goyder) described a highly dynamic and complex natural surface water system of hydrology—a region where half of the land's surface was subject to regular inundation, often for months at a time. People more recently have referred to it as the 'Kakadu of the South' and 'a wetland paradise'.

Unfortunately, while a wetland paradise is appreciated by modern day ecotourists, it was incompatible with 20th century dryland farming practices, and land-holders wishing to make productive use of their land saw little choice but to drain large tracts, beginning in the 1930s until the present day. This has resulted in a situation where today we have just 0.6 per cent of the original Upper South-East wetlands left in good condition. The few remaining habitats are critical high value refuges for the region's often endangered birds, fish, frogs and other aquatic wildlife, so we need to ensure they are protected.

The USE program has overseen the construction of a $49 million network of deep groundwater and shallow surface water drains in the Upper South-East region to address salinity and flooding impacts identified in the much wetter 1990s so as to improve agricultural productivity. If the success of this program is measured by the performance of deep drains in lowering water tables, then it has been a success. Unfortunately, however, deep drains have had other less desirable impacts apparently unforeseen in the original EIS, including the drying out of wetlands and the decimation of resident freshwater species.

Significant impacts from drainage have not been restricted to the 20th century. For example, committee members heard that between 2005 and 2007 the Department for Environment and Heritage has observed and recorded the rapid decline and probable local extinction of two species of freshwater fish—the freshwater blackfish and the yarra pygmy perch—in Henry Creek in the Upper South-East as a direct consequence of the Upper South-East program construction of the Kercoonda drain.

The Upper South-East program, as planned in the 1990s, is nearly finished. Only one of the proposed deep drains remains outstanding, the Bald Hill Drain. In addition, the recently developed $14 million Restoring Environmental Flows (Reflows) project, developed in part to reinvigorate some of the wetlands subject to the impact of the Upper South-East program drainage and also to make better use of some of the fresh water currently draining into the sea via Drain M, is proposed to be built concurrently.

The committee is strongly supportive of the Reflows concept, which it heard in average rainfall years stands to benefit a number of the Upper South-East wetlands by diverting drainage water inland, and in extreme rainfall years some flows are even predicted to reach the Coorong. However, members remain concerned about some aspects of the Bald Hill Drain proposal.

In the course of this inquiry the Natural Resources Committee heard a range of personal and professional opinions from local Upper South-East land-holders and government officers relating to the many aspects of the Upper South-East program. Some of the evidence and opinions expressed were complex and contradictory, making it difficult for the committee to separate fact from fiction. For example, on the matter of the likely impacts of Bald Hill Deep Drain on the neighbouring West Avenue wetlands, which is the home of the nationally vulnerable southern bell frog, the committee heard three distinctly different positions—namely, that (a) there will be zero impact, (b) there will be a significant impact, and (c) the impacts are as yet unquantified and consequently unknown.

The committee also found that the former chief executive of the Department of Water, Land and Biodiversity Conservation had undertaken to personally censor critics of the Upper South-East Program, a practice the committee considered unnecessary and heavy-handed. On a positive note, the committee notes the recent change of the CE—

Members interjecting:

The PRESIDENT: Order! The Hon. Mr Wortley has the call.

The Hon. R.P. WORTLEY: —at the DWLBC and looks forward to an improved relationship with the department under the leadership of the new CE, Mr Scott Ashby.

The Upper South-East Program officers predicted that the new Bald Hill 'smart' drains would pass 100 cent of the surface water flow to neighbouring wetlands via specially engineered crossovers and that these would result in losses of surface water 'so small that they cannot be measured'. The committee considered it premature to be making such predictions considering that final specifications for drain design and an environmental impact assessment of the proposed drain are both outstanding.

From the conflicting evidence and published research the committee has seen to this point, members remain unconvinced that the Bald Hill Drain could be guaranteed to maintain surface water flows currently enjoyed by West Avenue watercourse and wetlands. That said, current flows are insufficient to support the entire system in the medium to long term and, if nothing is done, the future looks bleak for the wetlands, which is why Reflows is strongly supported.

Members were pleased to hear that an independent environmental impact assessment of the Bald Hill Drain and Reflows proposal was agreed to by the Upper South-East Program Board at its 17 October 2008 meeting. The committee has deferred making a recommendation on Bald Hill Drain pending receipt of this environmental impact assessment.

Providing this independent impact study is thorough and rigorous, the committee will make a recommendation after considering the report. Until this impact assessment document is completed and considered, it is the committee's recommendation that no further steps should be taken toward the construction of Bald Hill Drain or Reflows.

The inquiry generated a great deal of public interest. We received more than 25 submissions and took evidence from more than 25 witnesses. I thank all those who took the time to prepare submissions, appeared before us to give evidence, or met with us on our site visit to the Upper South-East.

I also acknowledge the contribution of fellow members of the committee, Mr John Rau MP, Presiding Member; the Hon. Graham Gunn MP; the Hon. Sandra Kanck MLC; the Hon. Stephanie Key MP; the Hon. Caroline Schaefer MLC; and the Hon. Lea Stevens MP for their contribution to this inquiry.

Although the committee's report includes an alternative recommendation from the Hon. Sandra Kanck MLC, I commend all members for the cooperative spirit in which this inquiry was conducted. Finally, I thank members of the parliamentary staff for their assistance throughout this inquiry. I commend the report to the council.

The Hon. SANDRA KANCK (20:28): It is extraordinarily sad to consider that the South-East in general, and the Upper South-East is part of that, was comparable in extent to the Kakadu wetlands in the Northern Territory before white man came along. Only 0.6 per cent of it remains, and drain construction, particularly this last one (the West Avenue watercourse) has the potential to further damage one of the few remaining wetlands.

Central to this inquiry has been the issue of whether or not the committee should accept or oppose the development of the final deep drain—and 'deep' is the critical issue here. It is known interchangeably as the West Avenue Drain or the Bald Hill Drain, and it is part of what we have called the USE (Upper South-East Drainage Scheme). I will probably on occasion refer to it as USE or USEDS (Upper South-East Dryland Salinity Program), and occasionally when I am talking about the people, I call it the useless program.

What little that is left undamaged in the program ought to be preserved, and I think the committee had an opportunity to recommend to the minister that this final drain ought not to go ahead.

Unfortunately, despite the strength of the evidence, the committee has chosen not to recommend this way, so I have had a dissenting statement incorporated in the report. In it, I have recommended that the West Avenue drain not be constructed. I know that there is a small group of landholders who argue that, as they have paid their levies, they are entitled to have a drain but my dissenting statement addresses that issue by also recommending that, in association with discontinuance of construction, the landholders in this subregion who have paid their levies have them all refunded.

The committee was presented with evidence that no wetland in the USE scheme is in a better condition than it was prior to the construction of drains, although the scheme managers argued that the Morella Basin had benefited—in which case, if they are correct, then it is the sole beneficiary. However, even this claim is debatable given that the current salinity level in the Morella Basin is 27,000 ECs—a fact the scheme managers failed to disclose when they appeared before the committee and when I asked them to give me examples of a wetland that had been improved as a consequence of the scheme.

I see this as being typical of the lying by omission that this committee came to expect from the project managers and agents of DWLBC. To put it in perspective, 27,000 ECs is more than half the salt level of the sea and, to put it further into perspective, the salinity disposal basins in the Riverland that are designed to collect salty water have a salinity level that is approximately one-third of sea salinity, so we are talking about a wetland that now has water in it that is of a higher salinity level than disposal basins in the Riverland that are deliberately designed to collect saline water.

When you think that the water in the Morella Basin ought to be fresh, one would hardly claim this to be a positive outcome, yet that is what these people from DWLBC told the committee just a few weeks ago. The scheme managers have an extraordinarily poor environmental record. On their watch, the yarra pygmy perch has disappeared at Henry Creek. In the past two years it has become extinct. That is hardly a proud record, and these are the people we are now going to trust apparently to build another drain.

Waiting for the results of some sort of impact assessment as the Natural Resources Committee intends now to do is a pointless exercise. The evidence is there now about the impact of earlier drains on the natural environment. To trust these scheme managers to have another go would be foolish in the extreme. They have presented many examples of behaviour which show they are not to be trusted.

In that regard, this report has once again revealed a rogue element in the Department of Water, Land and Biodiversity Conservation. The Natural Resources Committee uncovered this form of behaviour with our Deep Creek inquiry where we found what we can best describe as an uncooperative department which seemed more intent on destroying the environment than supporting it, when conserving the natural environment is in fact its charter. These were different public servants this time but from the same department and it seems to me that they have been infected by the same virus.

During the course of this inquiry the committee found difficulty in getting hold of reports, just as with the Deep Creek inquiry but, fortunately, with the advent of a new minister and a new chief executive of the department, the 30 reports we had sought five months earlier were able to be found in a very timely fashion and forwarded to the committee. But without that intervention we would probably still be waiting.

We had drawn to our attention the doctoring of minutes from the Environmental Management Advisory Group (EMAG), which has been obviously set up to advise the people who run this program. We had evidence given to us from a member of DEH in the South-East, Mark Bachmann, in an email that he sent to them in 2006 in which he said:

I would like to draw particular attention to the fact that previous advice provided by EMAG to the board has been modified...The actual nature of the modifications concerns me less than the fact that a paper endorsed by our Committee has been 'doctored' after it was signed off and submitted to the Program Board's December meeting. The date on the version provided to us this week still reads as per the original paper...Nov 8th.

Another local landholder, James Darling, in his submission to the committee, asked:

Obviously a number of crucial questions arise about the circumstances in which changes to a document such as this could occur. What other documents have been given similar treatment, over what time period, and by whom? What does behaviour like this say about the overall governance of the project? How can anyone trust the claims, assertions, statistics and general information provided by the USE project when behaviour like this takes place? How can anyone, the minister included, trust the decisions of the program board in the light of behaviour like this? The unauthorised altering of the official work of an independent advisory group calls into question the integrity of governance of the USE project.

I echo those questions. They may have been rhetorical on the part of James Darling, but they are questions that really need to be asked. Unless they can be asked, you cannot trust the people who administer this project. I will just talk about the particular set of minutes that Mark Bachmann was referring to. I will read bits of the original and then bits of the 'remodelled' minutes. When I asked the people from DWLBC, who were attending the committee a couple of weeks ago, they became very offended when I used the term 'doctored'; so, we are now using the term 'remodelled'. The minutes state:

a. Deep drainage on the eastern side of the flat no longer proposed at Winpinmerit Section alignment.

This next word is very important—

b. Shallow drainage in the western/central part of the flat immediately adjacent to the edge of approximately 4,000 hectares of floodplain vegetation, much of which is protected under the Heritage Agreements...

When I read you the doctored minutes, you will find that b. has been completely removed. The original minutes of EMAG go on to state:

c. The proposed engineering of drains such that:

i. saline groundwater is kept separate from fresh surface flows, recognising that deep drains elsewhere have been unable to deliver the quality or quantity of water required by the wetlands.

ii. weirs could be used to reduce the proportion of surface flows lost.

This is how all of that then reappeared in the doctored minutes. I am not afraid to call them doctored. They state instead:

Deep drainage—

there is no mention of shallow drainage now—

on the eastern side of the flat and along the proposed Winpinmerit Section alignment. Deep drain to be constructed with containment banks on both sides of the drain and pipe crossover points to prevent surface water from entering ground water drains. Ground water drain also has weirs to prevent the drain being effective in winter/spring to ensure surface flows can be generated from the flat. In this way the ground water drain is a 'part-time' drain acting only in summer/autumn months when evaporation exceeds precipitation.

For those who are either reading this or listening to it, you will note that the last sentence I read was nowhere in the first lot of minutes that the EMAG people gave to the project managers. If that is not doctoring, what is?

The committee has, unfortunately, drawn back from criticism of the USE program managers on the basis that there is a new minister and a new chief executive. Its view is that the new minister and chief executive should be given an opportunity to bring this culture under control. As a consequence, there are no findings in this report in regard to this behaviour.

I have a different view on this. We need to highlight it and bring it to the attention of the parliament and the minister every time it happens. If we do not; if we just leave it on the basis that someone might accidentally stumble across that if they read all of this report, then that sort of behaviour can only continue.

One of the landholders in the Upper South-East who has already had a deep drain imposed on his property, Mr Frank Burden, in recent correspondence to the committee had this to say in regard to evidence given by the program managers:

Witnesses who confidently claim that science and analysis demonstrates that the proposed Bald Hill Drain will not impact on local surface water flows to wetlands stretch credibility to the limit.

Either groundwater drains are effective at lowering watertables, in which case surface water availability will be compromised or groundwater drains are ineffective and thus cannot be justified.

I think that simple analysis says it all. I am deeply concerned that this assessment that is to be undertaken by DWLBC will not be independent and that, when the committee receives that information next year, it will bend to their will. However, apart from that one major difference, I am supportive of the report. It has been watered down in places where I would much rather it had not been, but I do tend to be a lone voice on this issue.

This is the last time that I will be able to speak to a report of the Natural Resources Committee and, even though I have been disappointed in some aspects of the report, I commend the members of the committee for their willingness to at least keep asking questions.

The Natural Resources Committee has become a highly efficient committee due, in no small part, to the efforts of the committee secretary, Mr Knut Cudarans, and the research officer, Patrick Dupont. I thank them and all the members of the committee. I have very much enjoyed working with them. I hope that the person whom my party chooses to replace me will find this committee equally as satisfying as I have and will also pursue the injustices that have occurred in association with this project with the same passion that I have.

Debate adjourned on motion of Hon. C.V. Schaefer.

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