Greg Hunt (Flinders, Liberal Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for the Environment and Heritage) Share this | Hansard source

Mr Deputy Speaker Lindsay, may I say that you are looking sartorially splendid on this fine evening. In addressing the appropriation bills, I want to raise two issues in relation to capital and infrastructure. The first is the failure of the states to invest in adequate water and, in particular, ports, power and rail infrastructure and to put forward an approach which might deal with that. The second is to address a second kind of infrastructure, which is social capital within the Indigenous community—an issue which has now come within the remit of my portfolio and is becoming of increasing interest and concern to me—and to put forward a constructive proposal as to how to best advance Indigenous health and development outcomes.

In looking first at the question of hard infrastructure at the state level, I want to break this question up into three parts. Firstly, I want to look at the issue of water infrastructure within New South Wales; secondly, more broadly within Australia; and, thirdly, the implications of the failure to invest adequately in water infrastructure for other infrastructure projects across different disciplines within Australia.

Let me begin with demand and supply. At present we know that we are facing a gap—and this is information provided by the Water Services Association of Australia—of almost 1,200 billion litres a year by the year 2030. To give you a sense of what that means, that is getting close to twice the demand that Sydney currently has. We face that water shortage around Australia. That is on a business as usual case, based on decreasing water yields in some cities on a conservative basis and on increasing demands through population growth around the country. That is a significant problem. It is real, it is tangible and something which we have already faced in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Perth and Adelaide. It is a real problem experienced today as a result of a decade of neglect by the largely Labor state governments over that period.

The second element is the question of supply. We know that there is currently about 1,800 billion litres of waste, recyclable water which is currently discharged into our estuaries and oceans by state water authorities around the country. That is water which is recyclable. For example, in Sydney we have over 400 billion litres of primary effluent which is being discharged from the three principal outfalls. That water is recyclable. There is an environmental problem with this waste of water and there is an enormous opportunity cost which was made manifest in the somewhat ridiculous proposal to pursue a desalination plant for Sydney at a time when they continued to waste 400 billion litres a year of primary effluent which could have been recycled.

We know that the New South Wales government has ditched that plan, but it has failed to set out a clear proposal for recycling the 400 billion litres a year of effluent for industry, agriculture and environmental flows. That possibility is real. We recently discovered that the former AGL gas pipelines, which go to the largest industrial users in Sydney, remain as an option. These are disused gas pipelines, a conduit, which can be easily aligned to transmit industrial water for industrial purposes, thereby taking pressure off the environment in two ways. One is by decreasing the discharge of primary effluent and the second is by increasing the use of recycled water. Both of those are desirable outcomes, and the use of recycled water in place of potable water is a far preferable use of water for an appropriate purpose.

Why do we have this problem? You would imagine that no state would want to sully its coastline. The problem is that we have an old style mentality in relation to infrastructure. Water is seen as a single-use good. Traditionally there has been a notion that it is an inexhaustible good and free. Both of those concepts are wrong, but the notion that it is an inexhaustible good resides with bodies such as Sydney Water and Melbourne Water, which have failed to adequately prepare and reuse water that could be reused. Instead it is used once and discarded. There are small recycling programs. The figures available to me show that in Melbourne less than five per cent of water and in Sydney less than three per cent of water is recycled. In Brisbane 100 billion litres of water is discharged into the ocean—60 billion litres of that comes directly from the Luggage Point treatment plant and an additional 40 billion litres is discharged into the Brisbane River. This opportunity to reuse water must be accompanied by a commitment at each of the state levels to 100 per cent recycling. It is a simple proposition: the shortage is palpable, the supply is real and the opportunity must be taken.

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