Mr PEDERICK (Hammond) (17:17): I rise to make a contribution in regard to the Emergency Management (Miscellaneous) Amendment Bill 2024. It was introduced on 27 November 2024, noting that in 2023 a review of the Emergency Management Act 2004 was undertaken, given its increasing use and the complexity of emergencies in recent years. Only 10 declarations have been made in the act's history, with three declared in the last four years. Similarly, prior to 2020, the longest declaration was in place for four days, but declarations have since been in place for 793 days for COVID-19 and, one that was particularly close to home for myself, 118 days for the 2022-23 River Murray flood.

In June 2024, the final report of the Independent Review of the Emergency Management Act 2024 was completed. It was the first full-scale review since the commencement of the act and considered the findings of previous independent South Australian reviews, the framework of other states, engagement with 15 government stakeholders and responses from 74 public submissions. This included submissions from the former Premier, the Hon. Steven Marshall; the Hon. Stephen Wade; and David Basham MP, the member for Finniss.

The review made 28 recommendations of which the government accepted 26 and the remaining two in principle. The two most significant recommendations highlighted in the review are the introduction of a state recovery coordinator and a new declaration category State of Alert to support the upscale and downscale of emergencies. The review's findings and all 28 recommendations form the basis for the bill.

Of the 43 proposed amendments to the act, the majority of clauses implement the review's recommendations or are consequential to their implementation. The most significant amendments of the bill, supported by the review's recommendations, are as follows:

the appointment of a State Recovery Coordinator to assist the State Coordinator during emergencies and lead recovery operations;

a new State of Alert emergency declaration category allowing the powers of the act to be exercised to prevent or prepare for an emergency or to facilitate response and recovery following an emergency;

new powers allowing the State Coordinator to require information and documents to make declarations or plan for emergencies;

reinstating the temporary powers that were used for the COVID-19 response;

new powers allowing regulations that modify procedural requirements during an emergency;

a new mechanism allowing the Premier to mobilise the public sector workforce for the purposes of an emergency, preparation or recovery;

new victimisation protections for volunteers and employees carrying out emergency management responses; and

penalty increases from $5,000 to $20,000 for administrators or enforcers of the act disclosing sensitive information.

While the government indicates that all 28 recommendations are addressed in the bill, some are only partially accepted or require further scrutiny during committee. In committee, there will be a look at amendments involved in recommendations around the act's guiding principles that reference that specific planning requirements are needed for vulnerable people but the amendment only gives regard to particular needs of persons at risk.

Also, new information-gathering laws may remove obligations to protect an informant's identity under legislation, such as the Whistleblowers Protection Act 1993, the Police Complaints and Discipline Act 2016, the Independent Commissioner Against Corruption Act 2012 and legal client privilege. The minister may overturn some procedural safeguards themselves via regulations, which may still be rejected by the parliament. As the shadow minister, the member for Chaffey, has indicated, we will be in support of this bill with some questions raised during committee and some amendments put forward for the parliament.

Witnessing emergency situations around fires, and obviously COVID, which impacted us for so long in this state, I do not know if any government—and I hope it never comes to this—will be able to enforce the lockdowns like we had. The state using the state lines was very difficult. Me being one of, I think, five boundary MPs, border MPs, on the eastern side of our state, it was a very difficult process working with communities, trying to work with people so that they could not only still function as a community but also do their appropriate jobs.

I have mentioned in this place before the simple fact of the biosecurity control at Pinnaroo, where most of the biosecurity officers lived in Murrayville, across the border. Schoolteachers, school assistants and nurses were trying to get through to Pinnaroo to do their functions. Not only that but Murrayville has no fuel service, so they always came through to the On the Run to get their fuel in Pinnaroo. There were some emergency processes put in place by some enterprising individuals to get fuel in Murrayville over time.

It certainly caused some unhappiness during the football and netball season, I can assure you, when the Victorians got locked down deep in the finals and could not play in the finals of sport. That was distressing to the Murrayville community. They now play, I think, in the Riverland independent league. It certainly caused discussion all the way up to the SANFL and the netball association here in South Australia, because they were the ones that managed what was the Mallee league, now the River Murray league. It caused a lot of angst, and I fully understand that, but at the time I was part of the government, and we were doing our best to keep people safe.

Moving forward, the big impact was the 2022-23 flood of the River Murray, which caused significant impact. It was something that could be sort of planned for because we all knew it was coming, and it was just a matter of people heeding the information that was coming down.

The issue with the warnings is that, apart from giving a spread of flood heights—and I guess there are reasons for that—it gives a bit of a false economy on how much water people thought was coming down. Also, the simple fact is that, since some of the last major flooding—especially 1956 and then 1974—there has been a lot more infrastructure put in the river that has altered those measuring guides by up to half a metre. The constraints in the river have altered the measurement by up to half a metre, which obviously affected flood heights as it came through the Riverland and then through to the Lower Murray section of the river.

I was obviously interested in both sections, as the shadow emergency services spokesperson at the time and certainly in my home role in my home electorate as the member for Hammond. It was an interesting process and an enlightening process in one way, where what we saw, with the Emergency Management Act being instigated, was that things could happen in real time. We see too much—and it happens with both colours of government, so I am not trying to get too political here—the bureaucracy that grinds in normal speed, which is very slow—

Mr Whetstone: Glacial.

Mr PEDERICK: —glacial is a good word—to get things done, get decisions made and see that things are right. One thing I will say is that what I found—and I am sure other members did, like the member for Chaffey—is that when we as local members had direct access to people that we needed to talk to and they talked to us as well, it all helped the process, in a bipartisan way, to try to get the best outcomes for communities because this flood event was having a significant impact, and it was going to have a significant impact. It was about getting the best outcomes so that we had fewer areas flooded, more people assisted, and the relevant information through to communities as well.

I certainly want to acknowledge the direct conversations I had with Chris Beattie, the head of the SES; John Schutz, who was the head of the Department for Environment and Water at the time; and Superintendent Scott Denny, who is now based in Adelaide with the police force. They were fantastic contacts to have. You could contact them with whatever situation was going on, or when there was a little problem you could deal with it. I know I have talked about these things in here before, but it is really significant when you can actually get something done in a hurry.

My office had a call—I think it was late morning or around lunchtime on a Friday—that we needed to get out to Mypolonga to look at the situation there, where there was a temporary levee that needed to be built. Previously, we had not had any direct information that that was happening at this stage. We got out there and talked to some of the locals and could see—and they were telling me—that from the predictions the water was going to come through and it was going to flood the school and the bottom end of the town of Mypolonga.

Anyway, I started making some phone calls, communicating directly with John Schutz from DEW and then that instigated a whole range of conversations over the weekend. I know I have mentioned before—and I will probably get his name wrong, so forgive me, Con—that Con Babaniotis from SA Water was talking to me over that weekend, on the Friday and Saturday night as my direct contact, regarding what we do. Essentially what we had to do was form up where we were going to get the clay to build this 700-metre bund at the levee bank at Mypolonga, and it was great to have those direct conversations with the people you needed to talk to, like John Schutz.

John said to me, 'What about native title? What about this? What about that?' I said, 'Look mate, the pit we have identified was a pit in 1974. There's nothing there. It is intersected with a whole heap of irrigation pipes and SA Water pipes, so there will have to be some care taken.' Anyway, we got that cleared in fairly prompt time because the trucks were carting clay an hour and a half turnaround to the registered pit, and because it was emergency management, we could use the unregistered clay, and I am still not sure what the difference is apart from perhaps it has not been tested as much, but I will leave that alone for the moment.

Then I got a phone call on the Sunday close to lunchtime which said that there was one pit we needed to access clay and it had a mining lease over it. I contacted the mining minister, Tom Koutsantonis, directly and he, to his credit, had that rectified in quick time, by Monday morning. But it just goes to show that when it is hitting the fan, and it literally was hitting the fan, you can get things done, and it did happen right throughout that stage.

Down the track, we had contractors working on the Jervois levee bank and a couple of trucks slipped a bit one afternoon and people were getting a bit nervous about liability and suchlike. I got a phone call from John Schutz who said, 'Adrian, we can't keep funding it as the government, it's a bit risky, but you can approve the local contractors to keep operating on the bank.' At that time it was a $1,000 fine per head if you were not supposed to be on the bank. So, anyway, we went ahead with that. The trucks were authorised to go over the weekend. The next thing I get a text. I think it was on Saturday, and one of the truck drivers said the police were there. I thought that was interesting and I found out what was going on.

The police were just exercising what they thought was their duty in telling these people to stop working on the bank because they were contravening legislation and they would be fined. Anyway, I made a quick call to Scott Denny and I asked the police to just hold for a little while. Within 40 minutes we turned that issue around. It was just a little bit of miscommunication from the command centre in Loxton, so I was really pleased with those direct outcomes that happened then.

Then we had other issues. Like I said, people manage risk in different ways. I said to the racing club, 'You might need to put a bit more clay down at the river.' They have a water allocation, so I lined up some DefenCell bags through Chris Beattie, but then, because of the risk profile, the Rural City of Murray Bridge would not fill them up, which I found interesting. I will leave that there. What happened was that we got down there with three truckloads of sand from Spry contracting, and myself and one of my staff went down there for a couple of hours assisting volunteers bag up sandbags to help protect the pump for the racing club, which could have turned into a severe animal welfare issue.

As I said, it was very pleasing in real time, and I hope that always happens in these situations, where there is that flexibility. With the usual process, things get bogged down in bureaucracy, the checks and balances, but it was good that we could work with the people we needed to work with at a very senior level to get things done because we were there to protect communities.

Once the emergency was over, as quick as could be, as soon as the Emergency Management Act was lifted, we went back to standard procedure, which took a while to get used to. It is certainly legislation that we need in place. It certainly shows how it can be used for the benefit of people all fighting for the common good, whether it is pushing back against bushfire threats, whether it is COVID-19 or whether it is a flood or other events that our emergency services do so much work for.

The CFS has been very busy, especially in the Mid North, in the South-East and in various areas around the state. There was Birdwood last night or the night before. They do a massive amount of work in protecting our state. I want to acknowledge that we have had CFA volunteers from Victoria over as well assisting us down in the South-East, which is an exceptional thing. The air wing add so much more capability, and it seems there is more every year, which is a good thing to assist the members on the ground. They seem to have more flexibility these days in when they can drop and in helping to assist firefighters on the ground.

Of course, the SES do such a magnificent job across the state with their volunteers in rescuing people. We had a couple of stupid things happen on the river. We had some people who thought they could use something like a pump-up mattress to go down the river, and they had to be rescued, which just causes angst. They do marvellous work. Obviously, the MFS as well, with either their full-time firefighters or their retained firefighters, help to keep our community safe.

On this side of the house, we certainly support how the Emergency Management Act works. With the bill coming through now, with the review done and with the amendments that will hopefully go through, we will get a better outcome for emergency management into the future. It is a serious thing that involves not only the government from the top down but also volunteers from right across the state, and it can impact communities right across the state, depending on the emergency that is in play at the time. I will be interested to see the commentary in regard to the bill, and I commend the bill to the house.