Safe Drinking Water Bill
Mr VAN HOLST PELLEKAAN (Stuart) (17:15): Thank you very much, Madam Deputy Speaker. You have put me under pressure now with the 'cut and thrust', but I will progress the way I was going to anyway.
The DEPUTY SPEAKER: I was not actually thinking of you.
Mr VAN HOLST PELLEKAAN: Just because I am next I thought I was under pressure. This is important. Our shadow minister for health tells us that the minister has actually consulted very well on this and has been quite thorough. He and his staff have done that, so I think he is to be congratulated. I would also like to say that I wholeheartedly support the intent of this bill. The concept of providing guaranteed, or as close as can possibly be given as guaranteed, safe drinking water to everybody in South Australia, I think, is commendable and very, very important.
My concerns, as is often the case, are about people a long, long way away from Adelaide. At the expense of potentially sounding a bit like a broken record, I am going to share some of those concerns with the chamber. I said in my maiden speech that I would stick up for the people of regional, remote and outback South Australia, and I am certainly not going to stop.
We are told that 94 per cent of South Australians currently already receive water directly from SA Water, so they should be comfortable and I am sure they are. We are trying to deal with 6 per cent and I think it is a good positive step to try to deal with improving the quality of water, and it is probably important to say, guaranteeing the quality of water because, in some cases, and I suspect in most cases, the quality of the water will not actually be improved. It will be more the classification and the guarantee of the water that will actually be made clearer for people.
I have a fear that right now, having that 94 per cent/6 per cent split, one of the unintended consequences of the bill is that it might actually be 100 per cent because the 6 per cent just slip off the radar and it is all a bit too difficult. We have a list of remote communities that currently receive non-drinking water supplies, so clearly, they are really not affected by this unless they choose to step up and actively participate. This is about guaranteeing that people know exactly what they are drinking, what they are choosing to consume and whether they are happy to have the local supply or do something different.
As I said, I do not think that the water quality will actually improve in most of these remote communities. I think it will mean that remote communities supplying their water one way or another will actually have to decide whether they are going to participate in a more rigorous proving process, if you like, than they currently do, or just say, 'Look, we have always supplied this water. We have always called it drinking water. We are quite comfortable with the quality, but it is actually becoming a bit hard for us to meet all of the criteria that we have to under this new law. We will give you exactly the same water but we will just call it non-potable.'
That has actually been happening for quite a while anyway, so I think it is probably incorrect to say this will improve the quality of the water. I think what it will really do is make the quality of the water easier to define, and I think that quite often we might be getting perfectly good water that is called non-potable because of it. I would like to just give a few small examples and I look forward to participating in a very positive spirit in the committee stage, because I would be more pleased than anybody here if some of my concerns can be satisfied in the committee stage. That would be terrific.
I am not actually looking for problems but, for example, I will be looking for some details on the chain of supply. There are instances where very good high-quality water is received but then exactly the same water moves on, in very responsible supply fashion, I am confident, but it does not have that tick of accreditation along the way. What is going to happen there?
A specific example is a roadhouse in outback South Australia that receives water direct from the SA Water pipeline, but then it sells the water out of its own storage tanks to a handful of houses in that local remote community, all for the right reasons. It does not make money on it. The community has put in the pipelines and the meters so that everybody knows who gets charged for what.
Would those end users need that business to provide some extra classification because the water has come out of the pipeline, been supplied to the business fully accredited but gone into their own storage and into the local pipework, and then, very often through pipework personally installed by non-accredited people, into their own household plumbing? Where do you draw the line?
It might be very easy in that instance to say, 'Look, we are only talking about a few hundred metres and we have looked at the flow of the water and there is not enough sitting still or getting stagnant so, yes, we would be happy for that to continue.' I am sure that would be the case if there was no invoice being charged for the water. I am sure if it was gratis that would all be okay, but when you start charging for that water is there an obligation to provide, with the water, with the invoice, some guaranteed certification of quality?
Another very real example is a community where water is supplied by a very large company, but then it is supplied to a progress association, and then from the progress association to the local residents. So, it is a very similar situation, except much more distance is involved. I want to know what is going to happen to that water supply, because people may not know that an enormous amount of water supplied throughout outback South Australia is actually supplied to the end user by volunteer progress associations.
Sometimes they make a little bit of money out of the transaction. They are not making money out of water; they are making money out of their own free labour that they contribute, and their own bookwork, their own running around checking meters and their own laying pipework so that the small amount of profit that they make on the water they can keep in their own community for running the streetlights, community events and things like that.
I am not on a witch-hunt to look for problems, but I will be looking for some guarantee and some comfort that these people will not lose their water supply, perhaps because the business says, 'Look, it's all too hard. I'm not going to do it. Guys, I would love to keep supplying you with the water but I am at risk as a business—not me personally, but the business is at risk—because if I do this and then if there is a quality problem, it comes back to the business.'
A progress association might say, 'Look, it's all too hard. We would love to keep doing it but we are just volunteers. We are not in the water quality business. We are happy to handle it, we are happy to receive what we know is good water and we are happy to pass it on. We are happy to lay some pipework, but it is beyond the scope of our volunteer organisation to actually give you that guarantee and we don't want to pay the money to do the testing, and if we have to then it's not worth our while anyway.'
I am concerned about the potential negative impact on tourism. Certainly a lot of work has gone into bed and breakfasts and farm stays. I understand that and I think that is commendable, but there are a lot of other tourism businesses further down the line. I think of Innamincka, for example, which is a very important tourism destination in outback South Australia, about 1,100 kilometres north of Adelaide and about 30 kilometres from the Queensland border—a very remote place which gets approximately 50,000 tourists a year.
Despite enormous investment—I think approximately half a million dollars went into that water supply system about six or seven years ago—the water supply at Innamincka is very poor quality water. Let me be very clear about that. Essentially, it is settled Cooper Creek water that people get through their businesses and houses. While it is poor quality, people are very glad to have it; please do not mistake me. It is nowhere near drinking-quality water.
You probably could drink it at times of the year when the creek is flowing well. You absolutely should not drink it at other times of the year when the creek is not flowing and there is a risk of stagnation. That water is very, very gratefully received by the businesses there. Nobody claims it is drinking water. I understand that that is not captured under this bill, because they are not claiming it to be drinking water, not pretending that it is, but I would be very concerned if the next piece of legislation on this topic meant that that was prohibited, that they were not allowed to supply any water into houses and into businesses, into motels, into caravan parks, and that sort of thing, because the supply of water is incredibly important.
Again, it is volunteers who do this sort of thing. The rate for non-potable water, while I certainly do not know all of them for outback South Australia, is significantly less than the standard rate for full quality drinking water. I would be very concerned if this was the thin end of the wedge, potentially—I know it is not included in this piece of legislation—if it was going to make it harder and harder and harder for water to be supplied to all of these remote communities.
I am also very concerned that two weeks and one day ago we had the announcement that the remote areas electricity scheme was going to increase tariffs to outback users. Again, it is a separate issue, but I really do worry that, following so closely on the heels of that, with four days notice, I think, in 13 communities electricity consumers were told that they were going to have a very significant increase in their cost of electricity, we might just flow on. We will find that in weeks, months or years all of a sudden it is so much harder and so much more costly to supply water to outback towns as well.
I really do think that the government underestimates the importance of these outback towns. I look at a place like Innamincka, one of my very favourite places in the state. It has a population of about a dozen permanent residents and visitation of approximately 50,000 people a year. That town, those businesses, those people and, incredibly importantly, the volunteer progress association that supplies water, do a remarkable job to somehow cater for those 50,000 people.
If the government were to look at that in a town of 12 people that cares and says, 'What's the matter? That's not a big issue. How much did you expect us to invest to support that town, whether its electricity or water or whatever the issue is?'—I am not only thinking of Innamincka (I am thinking of that as just as an example)—that would seriously undervalue the enormous economic contribution that the 50,000 visitors make every year not only to Innamincka but to everywhere else.
You cannot just go to Innamincka unless you are fortunate enough to have your own plane or charter a plane to fly there from interstate. Apart from that, you must spend money all the way through South Australia if you come from the south, and that benefit is spread from Adelaide all the way to Innamincka. If you cannot get to Innamincka, then there is a good chance you would not go to the Flinders Ranges. Many, many people go to the Flinders Ranges and Innamincka. If they could not get to Innamincka, they might not go to the Flinders Ranges.
It is an example of what I really do fear may be some shortsightedness on behalf of the government. It affects roads, it affects water, and it affects a lot of other services that are provided. Purely looking at the population impacted, it would be a grave mistake, so I ask the government to keep that in mind when they look at how they might implement this legislation with regard to water. The water is not just for the local community: in most outback towns, the water is for the visitors who provide a very necessary economic contribution to our state.
I will leave it at that. As I said, I look forward to being able to ask some very positive questions when we get to the committee stage. I have some concerns, but I would be very pleased to have those concerns put to rest in the committee stage, with an assurance from the minister and his advisers.
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