Andrew Bartlett (Queensland, Australian Democrats) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As chair of the committee, I present the report of the Environment, Communications, Information Technology and the Arts References Committee entitled Living with salinity—a report on progress: the extent and economic impact of salinity in Australia, together with the Hansard record of proceedings and documents presented to the committee.

Ordered that the report be printed.

I seek leave to move a motion in relation to the report.

Leave granted.

I move:

That the Senate take note of the report.

Firstly, I would like to note that this report is the result of a motion agreed to by the Senate on 17 March last year, so it is just over one year ago. In that period of time, there has been a significant amount of change in the membership of the committee. That has meant that more senators have had experience and had their eyes opened to the issues of salinity and the ongoing issues that need to be addressed. It has also created extra challenges for the secretariat in ensuring the continuity of understanding of the issues raised. I would particularly like to thank the workers in the secretariat, as always, for their professionalism and their ability in getting this report together. I would also like to note the work of the senators who came along, particularly in the second half of the inquiry, and really pulled together a lot of information from submissions and public hearings. It is important to emphasise up-front that this is a unanimous inquiry. The point is made from time to time by government ministers in dismissing reports that they are partisan, that they are point-scoring and that they are just seeking to take political advantage. I hope that there is genuine seriousness from the government in absorbing this report and responding promptly and positively to the recommendations within it, because it is unanimous.

The committee consisted not just of me as a Democrat in the chair but also of Labor, Liberal and Greens senators all working together to try to produce a strong report that will build on the positive work that has been done in this area to date. I believe we have done that. I would like to thank the other senators involved in the committee, particularly the deputy chair, Liberal Senator Judith Adams, a Western Australian from the wheatbelt who therefore knows a lot about salinity, at least how it affects wheat growers in Western Australia. We had the opportunity to inspect part of that region. I would also like to extend the thanks of the committee to all those who helped in the field visits and organising hearings, because that certainly contributed to the value of the experience. One of the things that became clear to me and the committee over the course of the inquiry was that the nature of salinity and the ways to address it vary significantly from region to region and that the ability to tailor research and solutions to different regions is something we need to do better.

If I had to summarise in my own words or give a very brief snapshot of progress in dealing with salinity I would say: we are doing okay but we can certainly do better. We need to get more value from the dollars that are spent. We need to get more certainty about that funding and continuity of funding. We need better coordination of the research, better sharing of the knowledge and the ability to apply it in different ways at the regional level. We also need to do more to ensure we do not keep maintaining some of the behaviours that are exacerbating the problem. The report is titled Living with salinity precisely because we need to acknowledge more clearly that salinity is part of the Australian environment and something that we have to learn to live with much better than we have. There has been improvement but there is room for more. One thing I believe we certainly have to do is to not keep repeating the mistakes of the past.

The committee has produced 23 recommendations aimed at ensuring that further strong progress is made in addressing the economic and environmental consequences of salinity. One of those recommendations is to seek greater assurance, through the Natural Resource Management Ministerial Council, that the states and territories are doing better at effectively regulating land clearing and that extensions to the national action plan funding be conditional on the states and territories meeting more rigorous accountability measures in this and other areas. There is no point in taxpayers putting up significant amounts of money or, for that matter, industries or local councils or in everybody contributing their voluntary labour to try and address the issue of salinity if people are allowed to continue the sorts of behaviours that keep maintaining the problem.

This also applies to another area where the committee believes more attention is needed than has occurred to date, and that is the issue of urban salinity. The committee has described urban salinity as ‘a sleeping giant’ in the title of the chapter relating to that issue, or a potential sleeping giant—there is a question mark in the title: ‘Urban salinity: a sleeping giant?’ It is clear that the programs that have been developed to date, whilst mentioning urban salinity, do not give it sufficient priority. Perhaps more importantly, it is also clear that many authorities are simply not aware of or not fully informed of the issues of urban salinity, some of the reasons behind it and the enormous costs that it can cause. This is something we need to do more about now, for the reason I have just mentioned—that we do not want to be putting money into addressing salinity if activities are still occurring that exacerbate the problem.

We have recommended that the very effective salinity mapping that has been occurring in recent times needs to be conducted in areas where salinity is known to be a potential hazard before further urban development is approved in those areas. Decisions made today will affect the next generation. The cost of repairing the damage from urban salinity, whether it is to housing or, more immediately, to infrastructure such as roads, pipes and other underground and aboveground infrastructure, can be quite enormous. It is a cost that will be borne by the next generation—by local councils and state and federal governments in 20 or 30 years time, by the taxpayer and the public more broadly—if decisions are allowed to be made today that ignore those potential consequences. That is a key area where more action is needed.

In all the recommendations by the committee there is no suggestion that this is all brand new, that we have discovered all this for ourselves or that nothing has happened to date. The report is specifically and deliberately called A report on progress. Under its terms of reference the inquiry was set up to look at progress made to date, including what had happened since the House of Representatives committee inquiry into this area in 2004. There has been progress, but there certainly needs to be improvement.

The other areas that the committee emphasised included the need to extend funding for the National Action Plan for Salinity and Water Quality and the Natural Heritage Trust to ensure that people can do the long-term planning that is needed. As with many areas, this is as much about government’s role of enabling the community to address the problems. They can best do that, because in the end it will be up to the community—whether it is agricultural producers, local government authorities, landholders or the community more widely—to address this issue and to do the work that needs to be done. The role of government is to provide the resources, to ensure that coordination occurs effectively and to assist people to be able to do that. Something that needs to be done in that area is to ensure continuity, certainty and adequacy of funding. But it is also important to do more to try and provide ways for private investment to occur in these areas, and we recommend that examination be given to opening that up further.

There was a lot of comment during the inquiry about the need for an independent body to coordinate salinity research, to maintain a focus on dryland irrigation and urban salinity, to identify and prioritise gaps in research and leverage research from existing providers, to provide a sort of one-stop shop for salinity research and information and to have a website that provides a gateway for all relevant research. There is a lot of great science being done out there, but it is not necessarily all getting through to the people who need to know about it. So there are still lots of areas for improvement. I recommend this report to anybody interested in this issue. I particularly urge the minister and the government to respond to it positively and promptly. The committee put a lot of effort into trying to ensure that this was a unanimous report that focused on what things could be done quickly to produce strong results for the community. It would be very disappointing for the Senate and, I would suggest, a slap in the face for all those people who put their time into providing evidence and submissions—in some cases, driving very long distances to make sure their expertise was provided—if the government does not respond quickly.

Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would also like to comment on the report of the Senate Environment, Communications, Information Technology and the Arts References Committee. I was a participating and active member of this committee, and I must say it was refreshing to work on a committee where there was a bipartisan commitment to solving this important issue. I also should note that there were three very active Western Australian senators on this committee, which I think indicates the depth of interest and concern about this issue in Western Australia. Of course, it is an important issue around Australia. It is a huge challenge, and the report outlines the extent of the problem. It is a problem where there are no easy answers and no quick fixes. It requires cooperation and coordination on a huge scale over a very long time to slowly turn this problem around. It impacts on many aspects of the daily lives of Australians: our water resources, the production of food and fibre, how long our water heaters and washing machines last, how often we have to fix our roads and rails, and the biodiversity of our rivers, wetlands and low-lying bushland.

In recent months we have heard stories about how the extent of areas at risk of salinity now seems smaller than we were once told, which implies that maybe there is less cause for concern. As more detailed mapping of areas potentially threatened by rising saline watertables is undertaken, our knowledge of which parts of the landscape are likely to be damaged by salinity has improved and the extent of land at risk has been revised down. However, at the same time, a better understanding of the hydrological processes of these landscapes and better data on the impacts of different interventions on ground water recharge have led us to revise up the amount of intervention required and the time it will take to have a measurable effect.

So, while the area has been revised down somewhat, we have come to appreciate that the level of intervention required to address salinity is much higher in many places. We now have a much better understanding of where in the landscape we need to target our efforts, and we can work out how long it takes the water to move through the landscape in local, intermediate and regional ground water systems. In some cases we are talking about 20, 50 or 100 years between the rain falling on the slopes and the salty water discharging into the streams at the bottom of a catchment. What we can do now is prioritise the investment of our limited resources in those areas that will make the biggest difference. This targeted investment is now one of our biggest challenges through the national salinity action plan, NHT2, and hopefully NHT3 in the future. It is important that we do not do what in WA we call the ‘vegemite approach’, which is to just spread our limited resources very thinly over the landscape without targeting them properly.

We heard in the hearings of the Salinity Investment Framework, and it is listed in the report. We are now up to the third version of that. I am very proud to say that the Salinity Investment Framework came out of Western Australia. It talks about identifying priority assets, whether they are biodiversity, our towns, our infrastructure, our water resources or, of course, our agricultural land. What are the community values and what intervention tools do we have? What solutions do we have, and what is the likelihood of their success? In other words, how can we get the most bang for our buck?

So the targeting and prioritisation of limited resources is one of our biggest challenges. However, we have an even greater challenge, and that is that in many parts of these landscapes we do not have the answers yet. This is a critical point. For many of our problem areas we do not yet have the kind of large-scale economically viable solutions that we need to make a difference. This has been one of the major concerns we have heard about through the national action plan, which we call the NAP. For all the good work that has been done in developing a regional approach and identifying priority catchments, there has been an underlying assumption that all we needed to do was get the money out there effectively on the ground and that would do the job. Unfortunately, it does not. We need national coordination of research and ways of getting the research into national decision making. Most importantly, we need research into developing new industries.

There is very good ongoing work to make existing industries more sustainable. The Sustainable Grazing on Saline Lands project is an excellent example, and there are many more. All existing work on existing systems is very important, but this is only part of the solution. There is only so far we can go in making existing industries be sustainable and use water efficiently. We need new industries. We need to develop new systems for large areas of Australia where we have a pressing problem with unused rainfall contributing to rising watertables with no real solution at hand. This is why it is absolutely critical that we put effort into developing new landscape scale sustainable industries. Unfortunately, this is a very big ask and it is not something that is fitted easily into the current framework of NAP or NHT2. What is required to develop new industries from the ground up are big, clearly focused research and development programs to develop new technologies and land use systems, support and incentives for land managers to try out and adopt new production techniques, and then serious partnerships with venture capital to develop these industries.

I would like to draw your attention to the best example of this we have to date, which is the integrated mallee processing plant in Narrogin in Western Australia. Based on oil mallees planted for salinity control, it produces such things as eucalyptus oil and chips for wood products. It puts trees in the ground and then the biomass of plant residue produces energy. Many groups in Western Australia have put a lot of effort into developing this plant. They have supported it and lobbied for it over a long period of time. This is particularly timely for at this stage, as I understand it, if no urgent action is taken on this issue this week it is likely that 15 years of research and development and over $20 million of public money will be wasted when Western Power pulls the plug—sorry to use a pun—on this project a few months short of the finalisation of the economic feasibility study currently being completed. As I understand it, it was always known that this was only a trial plant, but, because of delays in starting and getting the equipment working properly, the feasibility study has not been adequately completed to provide the results to assess this proposal. I am extremely worried that conclusions will be reached about the success of this project without putting in the additional funding that is required to do this properly.

I believe that, if we are truly to develop new industries in this country for sustainable agriculture and to deal with sustainable natural resource management problems, we need to commit to long-term funding and see through the things that we start. This is particularly important for this plant, given that so many of our hopes and dreams for a sustainable landscape ride on this plant.

I am also deeply concerned that people try to pick winners in the salinity issue. As I said before, there are no easy answers to this. I am deeply concerned that the Minister for the Environment and Heritage was recently quoted in the paper as heavily supporting drainage as a solution to salinity. I have absolutely no doubt that engineering solutions, as they are more commonly referred to now, play a part in dealing with salinity. I was not on that particular tour in WA but many times in WA I have seen effective drainage programs. I have also seen those that contribute negatively to the environment and the landscape. I believe that engineering solutions have an important part to play but they are not the be-all and end-all. I would hate to see millions of dollars wasted on unsustainable solutions.

I commend this report to the parliament. As I said, it was a pleasure to work on a committee where so many people were committed to a bipartisan outcome to an issue that we know affects millions of Australians and, if unchecked, will destroy biodiversity across this country.

Judith Adams (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This report is based on an inquiry into the extent and economic impact of salinity and the long-term success of federal programs dealing with the issue. In my first speech to the Senate I highlighted the issue of salinity, which is a major concern to many areas in the Western Australian wheat belt. Living in the great southern region of Western Australia, an area which is being continually threatened by salinity and a rising watertable, has given me a first-hand knowledge of the severity of these issues.

I was delighted to be given the opportunity to become a member of the Environment, Communications, Information Technology and the Arts References Committee, ECITA, inquiry to look into the impact of salinity throughout Australia. The committee received 50 written submissions and a large number of tabled documents and additional information. Two hearings were held in Canberra and the committee travelled to Sydney, Adelaide, Wagga Wagga, Perth and the Avon Catchment situated in the Western Australian wheat belt. I believe this unanimous report containing 23 recommendations will be of great benefit in ensuring that further strong progress is made in addressing the economic and environmental consequences of salinity.

As I said in my first speech, there is no one-size-fits-all solution when dealing with salinity over such a large and diverse area. The costs imposed on landholders, governments and residents of rural towns as a result of the effects of salinity on infrastructure, water quality, productive land, biodiversity, remnant vegetation and conservation reserves was identified as significant. The loss in profits for the agricultural sector in Western Australia was estimated at between $80 million and $260 million per year. The cost of dryland salinity in eight tributary valleys of the Murray-Darling Basin is approximately $247 million per year. The cost of salinity to consumptive users of Murray River water totals $47 million per year. In Wagga Wagga, the damage to infrastructure in the town would amount to $180 million over 30 years, with some residents already spending up to $20,000 to repair their homes.

Turning now to salinity management in Australia, the measures the Australian government is applying to the salinity problem include research and development, making direct on-ground interventions and developing timely information on salinity. By building capacity in collaboration with the states and territories the Australian government is dealing with salinity through a wide range of initiatives and a range of research and development bodies.

The three main programs administered at the Commonwealth level to tackle salinity and other national resource management issues are the National Action Plan for Salinity and Water Quality, NAP; the Natural Heritage Trust, NHT; and the National Landcare Program, NLP. The NAP is directed at improving salinity and water quality conditions in the Australian environment whilst the NHT is focused on the protection and sustainable use of Australia’s land, water and marine resources. The NLP focus is on ensuring sustainable agricultural practices and providing support to landholders at a local level. The Natural Resource Management Ministerial Council oversees the development and implementation of these national natural resource management programs.

I am convinced that communities and committees right across Australia will need to work cooperatively to overcome this problem. In many communities this could mean adopting a new approach and a new mind set and putting aside differences of opinion about funding issues and how salinity can be tackled to find a consensus about these things. I believe local government also has a pivotal role to play in bringing this consensus about.

As we moved around the different states, it seemed that urban salinity had been forgotten. I think it is important, and I and other members of the committee raised this issue. I have an example of urban salinity and some projects in Western Australia. In Western Australia, salinity affects a large number of rural towns and there are 38 towns involved in the state’s Rural Towns Program. Katanning and Wagin are two of these towns and they are close to where I live.

The committee heard that a program to manage urban or townsite salinity had been underway in Western Australia for a number of years. The Rural Towns Program was established in 1997 and it is administered by the Western Australian Department of Agriculture. The program is supported by a 12-member management committee comprised of six government representatives and six local government/rural sector representatives. The purpose of the program is to assist communities in managing town site salinity. A total of 38 towns and communities are involved in the project.

There is also another project: the Rural Towns Liquid Assets project is being run over three years. This is a partnership between the Department of Agriculture, local government, the CSIRO and regional catchment councils. The project aims to demonstrate how to control town site salinity and produce returns from saline ground water production.

The objectives of the project are: to protect town site infrastructure from salinity; to protect remaining biodiversity areas in or adjacent to towns; to produce a model for integrated town water management; to develop alternative new supplies plus recycled water schemes; to reduce reliance on scheme water in towns; to foster high-value industries using new water supplies; and to promote local ownership of water resource management issues.

The total cost of the project is $6 million. The Department of Agriculture has committed $1.5 million in cash and $500,000 in in-kind contributions. A total of $1.5 million through regional catchment councils’ NAP funds will be sought. A total of $1.5 million will be sought from local governments. Other partners will make in-kind contributions.

In closing I would like to thank the secretariat, all the witnesses who came forward and my fellow committee members. I know it has been said that it was such a bipartisan committee. We all worked very well together. There was no problem insofar as which party we belonged to. I think that this was an example of how many other committees can work to achieve a result, as we have. In commending the committee report I hope that it will be taken up and some of our recommendations will be implemented, because it is the only way forward to deal with this severe issue.

Glenn Sterle (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I seek leave to continue my remarks later.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.