Legislative Council
GOVERNMENT BILL: Upper South East Dryland Salinity and Flood Management
December 1st, 2009
On December 1st, Mark spoke against the Upper South East Dryland Salinity And Flood Management (Extension of Project) Amendment Bill.
The Hon. M. PARNELL: The purpose of this bill is to extend the Upper South East Dryland Salinity and Flood Management Act 2002 for a further three years, from 19 December 2009 to 19 December 2012. Because we knew this bill would be coming up and needs to be passed before 19 December, and because the bill is contentious—or at least the scheme the bill extends its contentious—I took the opportunity to put a great number of questions on notice, if you like, to the minister.
Today, I was pleased to receive a written answer to the 22 questions I posed. I do not propose to take the council through all those questions and answers at the committee stage, but I will be looking for an undertaking from the minister to transform what is, in effect, an unattributed email back to me into a letter on letterhead so that the minister's answers are more formally on the record without the need to put all this into Hansard.
I will go through some of the themes of the questions so that members of the council have an understanding of some of the concerns with this legislation. The first series of questions was in relation to evidence that the drainage works completed so far under the scheme have, in fact, been effective in achieving the objects of the act. The minister's response to me indicates a number of areas where they say that there is proof. Some of the landholders in the South-East beg to differ and say that there is not the evidence that the objectives of the scheme are being achieved.
I have also raised issues in relation to the commitment to ongoing maintenance. Having been down and had a look at some of these drains in the company of local landholders and local conservation groups, I was certainly told by local people that a number of the drains filled with silt relatively soon after they were constructed, and that was evidence that it will be an ongoing and a continuous maintenance liability on the scheme.
I also raised questions in relation to how the overall objectives of the scheme would be managed, given the great variety of intervention works—deep drains, surface drains, things called smart drains. The most important thing, of course, is that we have an adaptive management framework, so that we can make sure that the management is responsive to changes. When it comes to managing the drains—the water in them, the wetlands—we need to make sure that it is based on the best scientific evidence, and, if the evidence is insufficient, then the precautionary principle should kick in to ensure that the environment is protected.
One of the things concerning landholders to whom I have been talking is whether or not we have robust administrative structures in place that make sure that decision-making is objective, that the effectiveness of management actions is monitored and evaluated and that the management responses are altered as new information becomes available.
There is a whole range of questions that I have asked of the minister that relate to endangered species discovered down there and various other things. I look forward to the minister's commitment to put that in writing to me so that it can be distributed amongst the relevant landholders in the South-East.
This is the second time that this act has been sought to be extended in order to complete the drainage scheme, which is the key objective of the act. When we looked at the bill last in 2006, I voted against it, and I did so on the basis of evidence that was presented to me by local landholders that the scheme was not working as promised and, in particular, it was not adequately delivering either economic or environmental benefits.
My view in 2006 was that we should use the opportunity presented by the sunset clause to undertake a comprehensive, rigorous and independent review of the works done to date, their effectiveness and their impact on both economic production and environmental values. We now see ourselves three years later in the same position again where we are debating the expiry of the act and deciding whether or not to give it a further three years of life.
It is worth just exploring what has changed in the past three years. When we debated this bill in 2006, the scheme was around two-thirds complete. Today, as I understand it, there is really only one major drain left to complete, and that is the Bald Hill drain. A comprehensive independent review of the whole scheme up until now has not occurred, but there has been a review of the desirability of proceeding with the final part of the project, in particular that Bald Hill drain.
The findings of that review support the construction of the final drain. My view, however—and it is a view that was supported by both local landholders and even some government scientists—was that we should not build this final drain and we should seek to keep at least a small remnant of the original wetlands in some sort of natural condition to provide something of a control against which to measure the impacts of the overall scheme.
In July this year the minister announced that he had approved the Bald Hill drain. I criticised that decision at the time, and my views have not changed. As I said, this is a contentious issue locally. There are local landholders both for and against, but the opponents of the drain predict that it will severely restrict vital natural freshwater inflows, especially into the Parrakie wetlands, which have the highest biodiversity significant index rating in the Upper South-East, and the Bald Hill drain is the last in a long series of deep drains that have collectively radically affected water flows across the region. Back in July when the decision was made to proceed with this final drain, local landholders basically reaffirmed that it was not going to be acceptable for the government just to build the drain and walk away. The ongoing maintenance was something that had to be guaranteed, and we know that that will come at a cost.
However, another development since we last debated the extension of this act has been the introduction of the so-called Reflows project. 'Reflows' is an acronym that does not quite but closely enough stands for 'restoring flows to the wetlands of the Upper South-East of South Australia.' This project involves the construction of floodways to partially redirect historic environmental flows to the Upper South-East. The hope is that it will manage flood events and that it will provide more water to the environment.
Among the landholders to whom I have spoken, this aspect of the scheme is generally supported although there is a great deal of scepticism that it will actually achieve much particularly in relation to the delivery of water to the southern part of the Coorong, which is an area so desperately in need of fresh water. My understanding is that it is now something like four times the salinity of the sea.
We even see ecologists, whose solutions to environmental problems rarely involve engineering, now saying that we need to pump seawater back into the Coorong and pump the hypersaline water out, so we know from experience that engineering solutions often lead to more engineering fix-ups rather than genuinely fixing environmental problems.
Having said that, the hope of local residents and my fervent hope is that the Reflows scheme will be successful and that there will in fact be some water flowing northward back up from the South-East into the Coorong. The drains proposed for the Reflows project are different to the deep drains that have been so criticised for their impact on the natural ecosystems of the South-East and the wetlands in particular.
In summary, my view is, as it was in 2006, that we should take the opportunity of the sunset clause to stop and take stock and do a proper review of all of the operation of the scheme to date. I do not believe that the decision to build that last drain was correct, and I will not be disappointed if this bill fails to pass and we do in fact buy ourselves time to at least keep one part of the wetlands system (which I think is now down to about 6 per cent of its pre-European settlement status) in some sort of natural state, because the local landholders around the Parrakie wetlands are desperately concerned that this final drain will in fact cause irreparable damage to the wetlands.
I will not be supporting the bill, but I accept that a majority of members of the council probably will, and it is my hope that they are right in part and that at least the Reflows project will deliver some benefits to natural wetlands and ecosystems.
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