Joanna Gash (Gilmore, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This country is in the grip of what has been described elsewhere as Australia’s worst drought since records have been maintained. The nature of the Australian continent has been acknowledged through poets such as Dorothea Mackellar, who wrote:

I love a sunburnt country,

A land of sweeping plains,

Of rugged mountain ranges,

Of droughts and flooding rains.

In other words, it is part of our lives, and any reasonably minded person would have accepted that it would be logical to drought-proof communities. After World War II, there was a spurt of activity towards that end. We saw the construction of the Snowy River scheme, the Ord River scheme, the Warragamba Dam in Sydney and a host of other storage facilities at a time when Australia’s population was considerably smaller. Since then little else of significance has been done towards drought-proofing our growing population needs.

Essentially, all these schemes relied on storage and the belief that the rains would eventually come and ease the pressure. How things have changed. The climate has changed, the population has grown, the face of rural industry has changed—all resulting in an increased consumption of water at the same time as what is now becoming apparent as a reduced rainfall pattern.

My grievance on this issue lies with the state government and their approach to confronting the challenges before them. Over the last few years, the New South Wales government have responded to the crisis of water shortage by increasingly pilfering the Shoalhaven River, so much so that it is said that up to 70 per cent of the water consumed by Sydney daily comes out of the Shoalhaven. Not content with that, they want to pillage the aquifers in the Southern Highlands, parts of which also lie in my electorate of Gilmore. This is being done seemingly with disregard to the environmental policies they advocated so vigorously when the Carr government came to power in 1995.

What is even more remarkable is the attitude of the Labor member for Kiama, Matt Brown, who has aspirations north of the river in the new boundary redistribution. On 31 August this year Mrs Shelley Hancock, member for South Coast, moved the following motion in state parliament:

That this House:

(1)

notes that it is the Government’s intention to massively increase water extraction from the Shoalhaven River;

(2)

calls on the Government to seriously commit to water recycling, re-use and water reclamation initiatives so as to reduce Sydney’s growing reliance on the Shoalhaven River; and

(3)

notes the environmental stress already evident along the Shoalhaven River and the effect of this on the oyster and prawn industries of the area.

It is for the record that the member for Kiama, Matt Brown, opposed the motion, stating clearly and unequivocally that ‘the government does not support this motion’. Yet he continues to mouth platitudes that he supports the community. What a hypocrite.

There does not seem to be any relief on the horizon—neither from the heavens nor from the New South Wales government, and the Shoalhaven River is in real danger of going the way of the Snowy through overexploitation. If this drought continues, the river will most certainly become drier, and less flow means that the gradual creep of salty water upstream will be unavoidable.

It is a real concern to me, it is a real concern to the residents of the northern Shoalhaven and it is certainly of concern to the Liberal candidate Ann Sudmalis, and now the residents of the Southern Highlands are starting to get that sinking feeling that they are at the mercy of the environmental buccaneers from the New South Wales government headed by Captain Iemma.

Despite this cloud hanging over the Gilmore electorate, we do have some good news stories, thankfully through the auspices of the federal government, and I would like to take this opportunity to discuss some of these briefly. In the present climate, including the environmental one of which I just spoke, the government’s community water grant has been a very successful and popular initiative. It shows the way for how we will come to regard the future use of water by encouraging recycling, rain harvesting and domestic storage.

Many of these grants are small but extensive and, the more people who learn of this new attitude, the more who will come to adopt water-saving measures. Mind you, these interventions are not new. They were part of the Australian domestic landscape a hundred years ago. When this country did not have the extensive water reticulation and distribution system that we have now, our forebears had to make do with water tanks, which we now are encouraging people to revisit, as well as other water-saving measures.

The federal government has been very supportive of the Gilmore electorate in a number of ways. The most significant gesture has been to contribute funding towards the Shoalhaven Highway from Nowra to Canberra: $34 million to realise a dream residents had been entertaining wistfully for 60 years if not longer. Thanks to the vision of this government, through its plan to develop a south-east Australia transport system, Nowra was allowed in, heralding a new era of commercial opportunity for the Shoalhaven.

The potential this offered, coupled with the massive investment in the local naval base, HMAS Albatross, stimulated investment and growth. More companies took advantage of linking into the defence grid and, in turn, those companies attracted smaller, supporting activities. The Shoalhaven is growing at the rate of about 2,000 new residents every year and that is putting pressure on the existing infrastructure.

Among the more significant developments in Gilmore has been the Shoalhaven campus of the University of Wollongong, first established several years ago, and now with a medical school included and plans well in train for a nurse training facility. The medical school means that we will soon be able to begin to train doctors recruited from the local community, who are more likely to stay in the areas in which they were raised.

Similarly popular has been the government’s Investing in Our Schools program. The benefit of this scheme is that the individual schools have discretion as to where they can spend the money rather than relying on the state government’s education department to allocate them resources at their discretion. It certainly represents a significant shift in the goalposts, and parents particularly have been very happy with this arrangement. The small equipment grant program has benefited many volunteer organisations which found the work they do a bit of a struggle. We tend to accept that volunteers will always be there, but only those within those organisations realise what a battle it is to get funds to do the things they want to do.

Yes, the government has been very generous in many ways, but sometimes communities cannot rely on the largesse of the government every day and have to accept some responsibility for their own fortunes. As a case in point, Blueprint Shoalhaven came about last year following news of a series of business closures this year impacting directly on over 500 people, with a further impact on perhaps another 1,000.

We just could not sit back and do nothing, so we garnered community support, created a planning unit and involved as many local people as we could. The teamwork that flowed was impressive. Many local industries and the council joined the process. The net effect was that we now have a plan for the future. In summary, the process consisted of four mini summits dealing with key industry and employment sectors within the Shoalhaven, such as defence, tourism, general industry, and health and ageing. At the conclusion of the six-month process, involving more 600 people from across our region, hundreds of volunteer hours and extensive media coverage, the Blueprint Shoalhaven action plan was delivered with a degree of fanfare.

The action plan clearly mapped out almost 150 projects—small, medium and long term—which could be carried out to bolster the economic development of the Shoalhaven and bring jobs to the region. The Shoalhaven has been hit hard by the collapse of traditional industry, like Port Kembla tin and Adelaide Electrolux, and the community has, through Blueprint Shoalhaven, shown that it is not prepared to sit back and take it.

Blueprint Shoalhaven has recently been awarded the Australia New Zealand Regional Science Association International regional development practitioner award. The award recognised, among other things, Blueprint Shoalhaven’s deliberative thought and action within the region, its overall development strategy for the region and, most importantly, its ‘quantifiable significant outcomes’. It is now incredibly important to keep the Blueprint Shoalhaven process alive and to satisfy the justifiable community expectation. We, along with the enthusiastic community members who make up the heart of the blueprint team, are now working to secure the necessary support to take blueprint off the page and into action.

As an indicator of how well the Australian government is supporting the Gilmore electorate, this year alone grants of over $42 million have been received. This included more than $2 million from the Roads to Recovery program, on top of over $14 million in roads grants to local government. Our schools benefited from the Investing in Our Schools program to the tune of in excess of $3 million. Added to that, the schools capital works program, this year alone valued at $13 million, has improved student life in many of our schools.

The government also generously supported the Dunn and Lewis memorial in Ulladulla, constructed to honour the victims of the Bali bomb blast. And many years after the City of Shoalhaven came into being, its first ever multipurpose civic centre will be built with support from this government of $3 million. We have secured numerous grants this year—too many to mention. But I did want to demonstrate the fact that this government has been a positive influence on the social and economic wellbeing of the Gilmore electorate. I would like to add that we have recently received an MRI licence for the City of Shoalhaven.

In closing, I would like to lend my support to that of my hardworking colleagues, who have the ability to make a real difference in the state of New South Wales. Change is certainly needed, and the three Liberal state candidates who are challenging the three state seats which overlap the Gilmore electorate are quality candidates: Pru Goward for Goulburn, Ann Sudmalis for Kiama and Shelley Hancock, the member for South Coast. Mrs Sudmalis in particular has a background in teaching and business. She has not been tainted by politics but has lived in the real world. She will make an ideal representative for the residents of the seat of Kiama and certainly one who can replace the tired candidate who just wants to have photos taken and who parrots his party line, no matter how contradictory and shallow those utterances are. The Gilmore electorate is doing fine, and I am anxious that this success not be held back by the incompetent and self-serving approach of a discredited Labor government. It is time to go, Mr Iemma.