Saturday Extra

A large proportion of Australia is drought affected, none more so than South Australia.

The state which receives 90 per cent of its water from the River Murray will lurch from crisis to disaster if the coming summer is long and hot.

So what is the state government doing?

Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

Geraldine Doogue: This week, The Adelaide Advertiser decided to really shock its readers. It said that emergency plans had been prepared to supply Adelaideans with bottled spring water for drinking because the drought and heat this summer could be even worse than thought.

Now that story's been scotched, as only part of contingency planning. But it was a symptom of the dramatic turn of events in South Australia, and it flushed out other remarks from water academics and people like Tim Flannery, indicating that things were really much worse than had been foreshadowed, even earlier this year.

So is Adelaide, let alone some whole regions of South Australia, in serious bother? Considering that the vast amount of its drinking water comes from the beleaguered Murray, something many of us outside the State may not have quite realised. Is their predicament something we have to face up to as a nation?

Well the State's Water Minister, who's in the intriguing position of being a National Party member, sitting inside a Labor government, joins us now. Karlene Maywald, welcome to Saturday Extra.

Karlene Maywald: Thank you, it's great to be here.

Geraldine Doogue: Do you think you could give us the worst case scenario that you're working on, and the best case scenario, and then the probabilities of both, please.

Karlene Maywald: Well there's a very small chance that in the water year from 2008-2009 (they line up with the financial years) that South Australia could be looking at very, very restricted use of water. The problem for us is, is two things: it's quantity and quality. The lack of inflows into the River Murray system over consecutive years is causing us huge problems, and we're looking at a situation where we may not have water that will be suitable for drinking, if we don't get good rainfalls next year.

Geraldine Doogue: So what sort of percentage chance of that happening are you working on?

Karlene Maywald: Well there's probably around about a 10% chance, up to a 10% chance of that occurring. It's really hard to crystal-ball these sort of things because we can't use the historic data we've got. Over 116 years of records on inflows into the system, we are continuing to break every record, and so it's very, very difficult to forecast going forward when you're in the midst of such an extreme event.

Geraldine Doogue: Dr Tim Flannery was quoted recently in South Australia, saying that with these sorts of results, the response has to be different to the rest of the world. You have to go into true crisis mode, he said. In other words, it's legitimate to prepare your people when you get to a situation like this. Now is that how you're seeing it?

Karlene Maywald: Yes, most definitely. We're doing an enormous amount of contingency planning, not only just at the local level within our State, but we're working with New South Wales, Victoria and with the Federal government to ensure that we've got appropriate contingency plans in place. Ninety percent of South Australians rely on the River Murray for water into their homes during a drought year. And that's what we're facing, 90% of South Australians' water supply is at risk.

Geraldine Doogue: You're speaking to us today from your electorate in Renmark, which is on the Murray, a citrus growing region among other things. What has changed in your community, given the lack of water?

Karlene Maywald: There is a dreadful feeling of despair, and an unknown future for many, many people. Our irrigators have what we call high security licences, which means that in most years in 100 they would get their full allocation. This year they have allocated to them only 16% of their water. For them, that means absolute devastation. They're having to make some incredibly hard decisions, they're turning water off to large sections of their community. We're seeing dying citrus and other trees all around the region; people are purchasing water that is coming on to the market, at very, very, high cost so they are draining their financial resources down to the extreme. And of course that's causing an enormous amount of anxiety in the community.

Geraldine Doogue: I understand in River Murray towns in South Australia there really are symbols of despair, you know, 'For Sale' and 'For Lease' signs becoming quite prevalent. How would you say your constituents are being affected by this?

Karlene Maywald: Look, this is going to take a long time for the community to recover from this terrible drought. And some won't make it through, but we're a very resilient lot out here in the country, and by working together and pooling all of our resources that we can at a Federal level, a State level and a Local government level, and also from the industry sector for endeavouring to minimise the long term impact. If you look at what's happening below Lock 1, which is at Blanchetown, from that lock to the Murray mouth is a very, very big, long lake, virtually. And the lakes down at the end of the system are going to drop below sea level early next year. And so the communities that are around those lower lakes, like most people would have heard of Langhorne Creek, it's a fabulous wine grape growers' area, they are going to be out of water. They cannot access water with the level of the lakes dropping below that level, and also the quality of the water down there is deteriorating rapidly. For the boating community, for the townships around Lakes Alexandrina and Albert, there is significant difficulties in accessing water. Also for our dairy industry around there, the number of cows has dropped by about 2,000; people are actually just choosing to exit the industry at this point in time because it is just too hard. And so there's some significant community and social issues that are occurring along with the economic issues.

Geraldine Doogue: Well see indeed Minister, as I listen to you there, I'm reminded of walking through as a West Australian, walking through as a child some of those old goldfields towns which were thriving in the late 19th century, and they just died. Are we talking about regional dying here, and does that have to be faced up to?

Karlene Maywald: Well there's absolutely no doubt that water is gold, and you cannot have viable communities out in the regions based on the current industries, without water. Now this is an extreme drought event, and I have no doubt that the end of every dry spell it does rain, we just don't know when it's going to happen. I believe there is a future for our regional communities, and for our regional industries, and it is a good and healthy future, but we have a difficult -

Geraldine Doogue: But you must have wrestled with this. I know you've got to say this, but I mean this is, as Mike Young, the Adelaide University Professor says, the situation in South Australia is really much, much worse than many people realise. Have you sat back and thought, 'Is it good ministerial behaviour to prepare people for the fact that this part of their life is over? This section of Australian life has to move to something else.'

Karlene Maywald: It is, but it's also important to put it in perspective. It is not the end of industry as we know, it certainly isn't. There will be some adjustment, and there will be some people that won't make it through the other side of this drought. There is no doubt about that, and we're working very hard with our community to minimise those long-term impacts. But from a South Australian perspective and from a national perspective, we understand that we live in a very, very variable climate; we understand that that's likely to become more variable as a consequence of climate change, and also just the natural sequence of drier years, and drier periods. So we are preparing for that, and our communities are well and truly aware of the issues that they face as a consequence of this drought, but also the longer-term challenge of climate change.

Now we have very, very efficient irrigation communities here in the region, particularly in the Riverland. In the Riverland we don't have any open channels at all, it's all piped water, we've got highly efficient irrigators that are using the latest technology in measurement, application, and we've become very, very good at dealing with very difficult circumstances.

Geraldine Doogue: Yes, but I suppose it is a legitimate thing to ask, isn't it, how has it got to this crisis level with this level of planning? Premier Beattie basically rode over the top of all opposition and simply got that recycled water plant up. And he said he retired happy after he drank that first drink of recycled water. There isn't anything like that actually planned, is there, for South Australia?

Karlene Maywald: Oh yes, most definitely. In fact we've got a $2-1/2-billion infrastructure investment package unfolding at the moment, and we're looking at two desalination plans in South Australia, one in the Upper Spencer Gulf that will support the BHP-Billiton Roxby Downs, and also supply water to all the Upper Spencer Gulf towns at Whyalla, Port Pirie, Port Augusta and the Northern Eyre Peninsula, and that will relieve water from the River Murray. We're also looking at building a desalination plant, we've got a desalination working group that will be reporting in the coming weeks to build a plant in Adelaide.

Geraldine Doogue: But this has only just been put back on the agenda, hasn't it? Back in January, Premier Rann rejected the idea of a desal plant, in particular, while ever Eastern States were drawing off drinking water out of the Murray for agricultural purposes.

Karlene Maywald: Well that's not exactly the case. What the Premier said is whether we need to actually look at all of the options for Adelaide, and investigate them thoroughly before we actually jump on board and just do desalination. It's a very expensive option that locks you into very expensive water into the future. So he wanted to make sure that we were making the right decisions based on the best available information and there wasn't enough around to make a decision at that time, so we established the desalination working group to actually do that work for us.

The other thing is that up until the last 18 months or so, Adelaide was considered to have one of the most secure water supplies of any mainland city. The reason for that is we not only had the Mount Lofty Ranges reservoirs, we also had the back-up of Hume and Dartmouth dams. Now we are facing the most extreme of droughts that no-one suggested. We all predicted that there would be climate change issues, we all predicted that there would be less water available, we all predicted that we need to deal with the over-allocation of River Murray in the system, and we've been working towards that, and we applaud the Federal government for what they've been doing with their $10-billion plan to deal with that, and this year we've had to re-think the parameters on which we've established the security of the plant for Adelaide.

Geraldine Doogue: I suppose the question is, do you think history will judge your government well or otherwise, along with other State and Federal governments I might add, for in a way saying to someone like me 18 months ago we had no evidence of this. You know, it's very hard to come to terms with the idea that Adelaide could be in this predicament without more understanding and more contingency planning.

Karlene Maywald: Well absolutely. And hindsight is a wonderful thing. What we do as governments is we plan for a whole range of scenarios, and if you were to look at the last 116 years of data and you throw the worst case scenario going forward, you would never get this year even. So that's the extent of how this is outside anything that we've experienced before. Now we understand and we wish we had the benefit of hindsight to have been able to plan earlier. The fact is, we haven't. We have to deal with the now and we have to go forward and do it as quickly as we possibly can, and that's what we're doing.

Geraldine Doogue: Karlene Maywald, thank you very much indeed.

Karlene Maywald: Thank you, Geraldine.

Geraldine Doogue: And Karlene is the Minister for Water inside the South Australian government and next week on Saturday Extra, we may examine the science of what could or could not have been predicted in this challenging area, the very latest interpretation of this, because it's affecting of course, not just South Australia, but many regions, as you'd know.

Guests

Karlene Maywald
South Australian Minister for the River Murray
Minister for Water Security

Story Researcher and Producer

Jo Jarvis