Bruce Baird (Cook, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The New South Wales government announced last week that they had shelved the deeply unpopular desalination plant which they had been trying to force onto the Kurnell Peninsula against the wishes of taxpayers, residents, scientists and water experts. This announcement was initially greeted with satisfaction by all who have worked against Labor’s ridiculous plan. However, as last week wore on, it became apparent that New South Wales Labor were playing true to type. Labor’s announcement is nothing more than another grubby sham being perpetrated by the New South Wales Labor Party against the people of the Sutherland shire. Despite announcing that they have shelved desalination, New South Wales Labor will continue to spend $120 million of our money to complete infrastructure for a desalination plant which they are telling us they are no longer going to build. Labor are still purchasing the site proposed for the desalination plant. They are still spending millions to put in a trial desalination plant.

As with their myriad of failures on the Cross City Tunnel, Labor are now liable for millions to compensate the giant consortia who stood to reap massive profits from the desalination plant’s construction. Most damning of all, Morris Iemma’s Labor government, who turned out en masse to announce the alleged shelving of the desalination plant, are continuing the flawed and skewed process to give legal approval for the construction of the desalination plant to continue. This is nothing more than a sham and a con against the taxpayers of New South Wales. Labor—driven, no doubt, by their spin doctors and pollsters—have identified what we have all been trying to tell them since July last year. The people of New South Wales, the people of the Sutherland shire and the people of the marginal seat of Miranda do not want desalination now, and we certainly do not want desalination rammed on us again after the next election. This move by Labor is nothing more than a naked and clumsy attempt to neutralise their hugely unpopular desalination plant and to mask their failures with water policy to attempt to retain government at the next election, due in just 13 months.

Had Labor consulted their own experts at Sydney Water, or even local residents and taxpayers, Sydney could already have functioning access to alternative water supplies. Instead, driven by the need for a quick fix to mask their failings, Labor have squandered untold millions of dollars on an unwanted, polluting and inefficient desalination plant that nobody wants. Desalination is, without doubt, the least attractive option for securing Sydney’s water supplies. In December 2005, Sydney Water was forced to admit, to the great embarrassment of the Labor government, that not one single water expert could be found to support desalination as a viable option for Sydney. According to Sydney Water, the plant would cost $1.3 billion to design and construct. The Australia Institute has stated that Sydney’s water prices would have to more than double, from around $1 per kilolitre presently to more than $2.44 per kilolitre after the plant’s construction.

Desalination has the potential to cause very real and very tangible environmental degradation and destruction. According to one whale expert, the construction phase of the plant alone could potentially change the migratory habits of whales, forcing them offshore and rendering them vulnerable to injury and death from shipping and predators. The plant would also release an enormous plume of heated hypersaline water underneath the path of whales and adjacent to wetlands of such environmental worth that they are protected by the Ramsar treaty as well as the JAMBA and CAMBA accords. Given the potential for environmental harm, what did Labor do? They enacted new legislation known as the critical infrastructure powers, which allow them to avoid the rigorous and fulsome environmental scrutiny which would ordinarily apply to any development of this magnitude.

At a recent so-called consultation meeting between rightly aggrieved residents and Sydney Water, one resident asked:

Why are 63 out of the 66 of your assessment criteria unresolved? 50 assessment items are listed as will be developed; 6 still to be designed, 1 is yet to be identified and 6 have been developed as far as is practical. Anyone else submitting a document with so many holes in it would be rejected in a second. How can you say this is a detailed environmental assessment?

Even Sydney Water’s former executive director of water policy knew that desalination was a farce. He said desalination was considered a joke in Sydney Water:

No one ... took it seriously. The only people who wanted desalination were the engineers from the company selling desal plants.

Given Labor’s obvious failings, with people dying in our hospitals; trains running off the tracks all too frequently and costing yet more lives; riots in Redfern, Macquarie Fields and of course my own suburb of Cronulla; gangs out of control; roads that are impassable and gridlocked; too few teachers, doctors and nurses; and surgical waiting lists equivalent to those of a Third World country, I pose the question to Morris Iemma: why can you not admit you were wrong? Why can’t you stop wasting our money on a desalination plant and stop this process? (Time expired)