Mr PEDERICK (Hammond) (16:18): I rise to make a contribution to the Appropriation Bill. Budget estimates are always an interesting time. Sometimes you get some reasonable answers and sometimes you do not, but it is a process that we go through in the parliament. I commend all the public servants who do the research in the background to make sure that the ministers can at least be informed.

I want to talk about development. In the first instance, we are all well aware of the housing crisis, not just in this state but throughout this country and around the world. It is something that needs to be addressed, and I am proud that my electorate is doing its bit to address it on a local basis. Part of that process is the Gifford Hill development that is coming online over the next 40 years. When I say it is coming online, there is action already underway on the housing part of it, a project that is only going ahead because of the vision of the Murray Bridge Racing Club, the horse racing club, to move their facilities from in the town out to Gifford Hill, about three or four kilometres outside Murray Bridge, procuring some land.

This conversation started back in 2003, three years before I got elected. Certainly, I applaud the Murray Bridge Racing Club for their forward thinking, on going out there and working with Burke Urban at the time, not just getting a racing club built but a project that is part of a bigger plan of revolutionising Murray Bridge and surrounding districts. As we move forward and as the discussion has been through estimates and beyond the Greater Adelaide Regional Plan and the growth that is forecast to happen from Murray Bridge up through to Callington, I was very pleased to see the other day the announcement of these 17,100 homes that Grange will build.

One thing that was very interesting was that there were no government members or ministers near the announcement, which was disappointing. You have to wonder, when it is such a major announcement in this state. This will really be a game changer. There are plenty of negative Nellies online and wherever else saying it will not happen, but people need to remember that this project started 21 years ago and it is a long-term project. Within a couple of years, the first 1,400 homes will be on the way.

Obviously, you have to dodge through that minefield of planning regulation, not just through the state processes but local government processes. Obviously, there will be multiple schools, there will be healthcare facilities over time and it will essentially triple the size of Murray Bridge. The developer, Grange, certainly has interest in land not just at the original Gifford Hill site. There is land adjacent. Some of that land is fine. It is not in the Environment and Food Production Areas, but some of it is. So there are going to have to be some changes around the Environment and Food Production Areas to see the full realisation of this project, not just in the area near and around Gifford Hill but further out as it moves forward over the decades.

Minister Champion and the government need to be aware of that. If I had my way, the EFPA (Environment and Food Production Areas) block on development in this state would be completely got rid of because there are so many planning rules and people have to jump through so many hoops anyway, and this is just a hoop that blocks realistic development into the future. I applaud everyone involved in that major development locally.

Also, during estimates, we had a discussion around regional roads. It was very disappointing to see that, through the budget process, the capital program funding for regional roads and transport projects has decreased by $172 million compared with last year. There was $310.6 million in new money allocated for regional road and transport improvements, but $250 million of that is for upgrading the South Eastern Freeway between Mount Barker and Adelaide. This leaves a measly $60 million in new money for the 24,000 kilometres of truly regional roads across the state.

It is a bit like the $98 million that we saw allocated to road safety funding but then we see $40 million or $42 million of that going to upgrade a roundabout in Mount Barker, which does not have to be upgraded. I challenged the local member when he was the Speaker one day in here and said that money should be transferred to the intersection on the freeway outside Mount Barker, which is essentially a dog's breakfast and needs a new roundabout and a new way, as part of the Hahndorf project, to get people onto the freeway or off of the freeway appropriately. Anyone I talk to in Mount Barker is just stunned at this other roundabout, where there will have to be compulsory acquisitions and it will take out the local fish and chip and chicken shop and other houses, etc. Anybody locally can see that it just is not the issue that it is made out to be.

I was questioning the Minister for Transport about alternative freight routes between Murray Bridge and Mannum to get freight out of Murray Bridge, which is part of the discussion of the Greater Adelaide Freight Bypass. As we have seen, and I have mentioned multiple times in this house, there has been an expansion in the size of freight options moving forward, noting that nothing bigger than a B-double truck can come down the freeway. All of those bigger combinations—right up to AB-doubles, which is essentially a B-double with another semitrailer hooked to it—have to go around.

I applaud the work that is being done on the Halfway House corner on the Sturt Highway and am questioning the minister about that. That is being built for triple trailer road train capacity. I applaud that forward thinking going into the future, because you do not always see it. But sadly, there is the Hahndorf project, where we saw $250 million sucked out of a project by the Labor Party both federally and state. There is $200 million that has been sucked out of the Truro freight bypass project, which is disgraceful when we are trying to do our best to get as much freight as possible around Adelaide and around the Hills and off the freeway.

Carriers are already doing that. It does have its issues, because it does add extra time for truck drivers, and time is valuable. They can only be on the road for 12 hours a time, so it is not just a simple process of adding another hour or an hour-and-a-half to a journey, because obviously they have to manage their logbooks for safety reasons. It is something we need to be mindful of.

I note that the government are looking at another bypass route instead of taking heavy freight through the current Morris Road-Hindmarsh Road route through to Mannum Road and then up towards the state highway. They are looking at coming in around Monarto, which some trucks already do, but making it the formal route. A new $4½ million roundabout will have to be built at Monarto on the Old Princes Highway corner and the route will be put around there.

The business case is still underway for the Swanport Bridge duplication: the first five kilometres of the south-east duplication of the Dukes Highway—or Princes Highway; it is pretty close to each one, but heading out towards the Motorsport Park—out of Tailem Bend to get that duplication program that is so desperately needed. I know there have been different investigations and business case studies underway, and we learned during estimates that they are ongoing, but the Swanport Bridge definitely needs duplicating.

We definitely need a major investment back into our regional road systems. In the time since we were in government, I am appalled to see the progress of mainly projects that we instigated when we were in government. I look at the duplication works to Lochiel on the Augusta Highway project and it is appalling. This project should be finished by now. We started it in government and there used to be a lot of vehicles, people and machines working on that project; I think I saw one truck movement the other day when I was going through. It is just starved of workers. It is like the government are deliberately starving the budget for that.

Another project that I am passionate about is the Strzelecki Track upgrade project, which still is only 40 per cent completed and I believe is collapsing under poor management decisions and just not getting the money that was allocated in the budget to get that project completed.

Talking about emergency services, I am still intrigued about the CFS facilities audit and the $817,000—and we asked questions about this in the estimates process—that has been allocated to the CFS to investigate their facilities, which includes CFS trucks, sheds, bases, etc. This is an organisation where hundreds of millions of dollars have been invested over many years. I salute the 13,000 volunteers in the organisation; I am one of them. It is just bizarre that an organisation that big cannot go to a database of what their facilities are like and what they have and just dial it up. I am stunned at that.

I know that during the process there has been an amount of $1.65 million allocated to the Metropolitan Fire Service for PFAS remediation and testing. It is good to know that that testing is underway and some contaminated sites have already been identified.

Another thing that shocked me: the other day I went to my local brigade, Coomandook, for the annual general meeting and I saw a big checker plate alloy bin. I said, 'What's that?' and they said, 'That's the laundry bin.' I said, 'Are you serious?' Right across the state, these laundry bins are being deployed—with a big lock on them, obviously—and put outside the sheds so that people can put their uniforms in there if they need to be sent away to get washed. They will go in tubs and be pulled out and there will be a contractor who will drive right around the state picking up uniforms. I just cannot believe it.

For the money to build these storage bins, you could have put an industrial washing machine at every facility. I just cannot understand the money going into this project. I get the theory of it because of structure fires and problems with asbestos. We had a structure fire that our brigade fought last year, I think it was. I get that it is about protecting people and getting the clothes looked after without taking them home to wash, but I think there is a far more economical way to do it.

In veterans' affairs, it is great to see that in South Australia more than 47,000 people have served in the Australian Defence Force. Mental health and wellbeing continue to be the main matters of importance for veterans. There are still some issues with the federal Department of Veterans' Affairs. It is an ongoing challenge for veterans in South Australia.

I must say as a proud Port Adelaide supporter—I am very happy to see them at number two on the ladder, and they will get two home finals—it was great to hear about the great work they are doing with veterans via the Power Community Limited ADF Veterans Program assisting veterans with the transition to civilian life. It has also been good to see the Veterans SA Career and Business Mentoring Program ongoing. This was an initiative of the former Marshall Liberal government and I hope it will continue well into the future.

I want to talk about energy quickly. I know gas was raised today during question time. With all the talk about green energy and how good it is, I think we are really going to see what goes wrong with the massive solar farm and the amount of wind turbines that are going to be built to run the so-called hydrogen plant at Whyalla. I think it is going to have to generate a massive amount of energy because 80 per cent of that energy will be lost in the transition through to hydrogen.

I think the only way it is going to work, in my mind, is a great big gas pipe in the back of the plant. The issue is that we are running out of gas, and one of the reasons for that is we have protestors—whoever they are and whoever they want to be—protesting against gas developments right around the country, whether it is the Scarborough project off WA or the Barossa project off the Tiwi Islands run by Santos, and the billions of dollars they will put into the country. There is also the stalled Narrabri project in New South Wales.

There was a bit of a conversation by Minister Koutsantonis about factors affecting gas shortages across the country, and he mentioned where our party voted to ban gas extraction in some parts of the state. One comment he made was:

I exclude the member for Hammond from that criticism [of that decision] who was a supporter of the gas industry and was prepared to cross the floor to vote with the opposition to stop that. He is a man of principle.

That is very interesting coming from a mining minister who, when the Bird in Hand project was fully authorised by the department and had the full environmental approvals after over a decade of assessment, stepped in as the final arbiter and stopped the Bird in Hand goldmine in Woodside with his decision, overriding all the environmental statements and investigations that had been done. It is just outrageous.

There is similarity to where Tanya Plibersek federally has just blocked a billion-dollar goldmine near Orange. I note that the New South Wales Labor Party is having a fight with the federal Labor Party over getting that investment into New South Wales because they acknowledge the need for the money to be extracted, literally the gold and those critical minerals, for the state and the country.

As my time is starting to roll out, there were questions about net zero and agriculture. There is great concern about the baseline of where those investigations start, because farmers have been utilising single-pass, no-till and zero-till farming practices for over 30 years, which has been putting in great amounts of carbon sequestration over that time. Farmers come to me and say, 'Where do we stand in this process? Where do we stand going forward?'

The minister, the Hon. Clare Scriven, asked me if I was referring to carbon credits. I said that it is not just carbon credits but farming in general and what they are doing to build up the soil profile. The minister made the following comment:

I think, on what might be a fairly rare occasion, I am going to agree with the member for Hammond on a topic, which is that the farmers have been doing a lot of great work.

Yes, they have, but they need to know where they stand going into the future. It is one thing to say, 'We'll have this net zero program,' but if the line in the sand is going to be in 2024 and not back in the 1980s or 1990s when a lot of these farming practices were changed from multiple passes over paddocks and people were taking great advantage of managing their soils, managing their water retention and managing the whole process, where do they stand? There needs to be a major investigation into that going forward, and I hope the minister takes on board the discussions that we had during estimates.