Mr PEDERICK (Hammond) (16:57): I rise to speak to the Planning, Development and Infrastructure (Environment and Food Production Areas) Amendment Bill 2025. This bill comes about because of the need for amendments to the planning bill and to make sure that we have the appropriate amount of housing for growth into the future. We are certainly supportive of this bill with some amendments.

In light of my area, we have had a lot of history with housing proposals down towards Murray Bridge and Monarto, so to give a little bit of history about how the environment and food production areas came about, I was one of the few who were here in 2016—there were a few of us, I guess—when the planning legislation went through the house under Minister John Rau at the time. Our shadow minister was the former member for Goyder, Steven Griffiths, and he did a great job from our side of the house in working through the complexities of a very complex piece of legislation; it went on for months and months and months because it had to be held up at times so that other legislation could be debated.

There were a lot of changes from the original bill as it came through. There were about 300 government amendments and about 300 of our amendments, and there were probably some amendments from the crossbenches, mainly in the other place. So there was a lot of debate and a lot of changes. One of those changes was about 50 clauses in to the committee stage, which was interesting, with the introduction of the environment and food production area. So that is where they came in. It is a bit interesting that they were not part of the original bill. Essentially—and I did ask the minister this three times until I got the answer at the time—what the environment food production areas do is basically have the same power as the Barossa protected area and the McLaren Vale protected area.

We are at a point in time now where obviously we have a housing crisis, and this bill has come into place to cater for those needs. As I said, my electorate has had a deep history going back to the late sixties, early seventies with the Monarto proposal. I have always said it was quite visionary of former Premier Don Dunstan to go down this path, but I think it may have worked if he had gone another 15 kilometres down the road and expanded Murray Bridge instead of trying to set up a satellite city.

There were some problems: public servants did not want to move out and a whole range of things. I am not having a crack at public servants, I am just recalling history as I see it from what happened at the time. It created a whole lot of interesting scenarios where a lot of farms obviously were sold up and people travelled further down the road to my area of Coomandook and Coonalpyn and bought properties down there.

What happened out of all that was the land ended up getting realised. A lot of it went in 100-acre or 40-hectare blocks as you would call them now, lifestyle blocks, and a lot of these blocks are on remote water supply. One thing we did get out of it was the Monarto Safari Park, which is absolutely world class, and going on to bigger and better things with the accommodation about to be opened up in the near future and the elephants arriving over time, in addition to the couple we have there now. We have that bit of history going back 50-odd years.

We have then been fortunate in a way with the vision of the Murray Bridge Racing Club, the horse racing club, to have a new facility out at Gifford Hill, out towards the lakes from Murray Bridge about three kilometres up Brinkley Road. That proposal came from Brenton Lewis, who was the mayor later on in Murray Bridge, and the team at the racing club to move out there to essentially a greenfield site and build the racing club facilities and also have room for housing.

I think there were originally 3,500 blocks on that site and they dealt with the local landholder, who I assume got a bit of uplift with this proposal, and he bought some property then at Langhorne Creek. Of course, this was not straightforward obviously with rezoning and that kind of thing. The proposal eventually got up, and over many years now we have the fantastic racing club at Murray Bridge, which is rated as a metropolitan track now. It does run some Morphettville meets there, and I am glad to be involved there and glad to be a sponsor, and we are hoping for bigger and better things over time.

Burke Urban was the developer in the initial stages of that plan. The old racing club site inside Murray Bridge's town boundaries has been opened up for housing development, as well as a couple of extra holes at the golf club. That process has been ongoing for many years. We have got the racing club there, we have got trainers' stalls that have gone in place, a big trainers' shed and stabling facilities there for race day events. The racing club is essentially an island looking for something to go around it, and this is the opportunity.

To be frank, Gifford Hill was kept outside of the environment and food production area because I think it was already rezoned and ready to go, so that was where we had a bit of a leg-up in regard to this sort of proposal. Recently, as time has gone on, we saw the announcement last August where we could have 17,100 homes built over the next 40 years. It may take a shorter time, but obviously that is a broader timeframe. I only recently met with the Grange developers last week and they are very keen to get on with the job, finalising their discussions with council on what they need to do. They are certainly very proactive on how to get in there and they want to get on with it and start building the first 1,500 homes as soon as possible.

Some of this obviously comes with getting land excised out of the environment and food production area. There are 1,243 hectares in the Murray Bridge area that are within the EFPA and 1,489 hectares outside the environment and food production area, which gives a total of 2,732 hectares or, in the old language, 6,830 acres. It is part of the Greater Adelaide Plan and certainly there is lots of opportunity for growth on the country between Murray Bridge and Callington, but it has to be done appropriately and we need to make sure that we have the issues of other land users front of mind. It is something I have dealt with over years with the interests of agricultural production and value-add production.

We have the chicken industry which does everything from go to whoa in the area, from raising the chickens until you get up through to Kanmantoo and the processing of the chicken manure at Neutrog into organic fertilisers. We have Thomas Foods who have now moved out on Mannum Road with their facility processing over 600 beasts of cattle a day at the moment, and there are about 400 people employed out there. There would be hundreds involved in the chicken industry overall because it is go to whoa: it is the feed mill, it is the growing, it is the catching, it is putting them on the trucks. There is a truck on the freeway every 20 minutes going up to the north of Adelaide near Burton, I think it is, to process them.

We have Big River Pork; I think they employ about 350 people. We have Costa Mushrooms who recently doubled their vertical growing facilities at Monarto, which is at the top Monarto end of this proposal. They employ 500 people who come from a fair range of areas, including locally and from Adelaide up through to Salisbury, to work on that facility. It is a great facility and they do great work, and they are looking into the future for more expansion.

Yes, we do need the housing growth and we are a very good place for it in the surrounding area. It is not like Mount Barker, which is essentially a dormitory suburb. There are not a lot of big operations there for jobs in Mount Barker. There are a lot of commuters: they go every which way from Mount Barker, whether it is to Adelaide, Murray Bridge or elsewhere for work in the main. Sure, there are service jobs and shops there and that kind of thing, but a lot of people travel out.

We do have the employment lands around Murray Bridge which are part of this process as well. When this process is all finalised, I think it takes the employment lands out to 1,389 hectares, so we have plenty of growth opportunities. It is not just those big food processing companies that are there. There is light engineering, medium engineering, a whole range of truck work operations that are done in Murray Bridge and a whole lot of different jobs that are done.

Certainly, in the food processing area, it is not just swinging knives anymore in a processing facility. There are a lot of technical jobs, such as in Thomas Foods where once the meat lands in a box, it does not need a human hand on it; it gets travelled through to the 10-storey chillers to be stored, whether it is in a few boxes at a time or pallet loads. It is quite tech-focused.

We do have to make sure we get things right, and we are certainly keen to see, as we open up the lands over time, that we get the right land being used for building on, because obviously we still have to produce food in this great state. I have said it in here before: the best land in South Australia is probably directly under this building, right along the River Torrens here; it is some of the best farmland in the state. But we cannot change that—and we will not be changing it.

There is something that I have looked at that has happened in Queensland over time. It is the Queensland Agricultural Land Audit, which:

…identifies land important to current and future production and the constraints to development, highlighting the diversity and importance of Queensland's agricultural industries.

In terms of what it covers, the audit includes:

• • maps showing current and potential agricultural land use
  • strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats to agricultural development for each region across Queensland
  • information on land uses, infrastructure, biophysical conditions and constraints to agricultural development.

It is a key reference tool to help guide investment in the agricultural sector and inform decision-making to ensure the best future use of the state's agricultural land.

The use of this audit will assist land and resource managers, investors and government officers to:

• • inform strategic policy, planning and investment decisions. This may include the protection of locally important agricultural areas, investment in infrastructure which supports agriculture (e.g. roads, water supply) or natural disaster planning
  • assist in modelling the impact of certain developments on agricultural land. This may include biophysical information such as soil type, identification of suitable alternative development areas or co-location of compatible land uses
  • drive local and regional economic development opportunities such as increasing market access, demonstrating best management practice or providing certainty to different land use sectors within a region
  • conduct due diligence assessments.

As part of the Queensland process, they set up a land class framework, where the land and soil information has been classified using the agricultural land class (ALC) scheme:

Adapted from the Agricultural land evaluation guidelines for Queensland, the standard definitions of each class are:

• • Class A: Crop land that is suitable for a wide range of current and potential crops with nil to moderate limitations to production.
  • Class B: Limited crop land that is suitable for a narrow range of current and potential crops due to severe limitations, but is highly suitable for pastures. Land may be suitable for cropping with engineering or agronomic improvements.
  • Class C: Pasture land that is suitable only for improved or native pastures due to limitations which preclude continuous cultivation for crop production. Some areas may tolerate a short period of ground disturbance for pasture establishment.
  • Class D: Non-agricultural land and land not suitable for agricultural uses due to extreme limitations. This may be undisturbed land with significant conservation or catchment values, land that may be unsuitable because of very steep slopes, shallow soils, rock outcrop, poor drainage, salinity, acidic drainage, or is an urbanised area.

Current agricultural land use was mapped across the state, using data from the Queensland Land Use Mapping Program. They also looked at native forestry areas and grazing areas in regard to this matter.

Certainly in my area, as I have said, there has been a long history of proposals for urban development. Essentially, to Murray Bridge it is only three-quarters of an hour from the Glen Osmond lights. I think there certainly need to be improvements in public transport and metro ticketing with the growth of the area and the easy reach that people do need for going to the city.

Murray Bridge, apart from being somewhere that you can work, rest and play (and you can do all those things there), is ideal for the retirement sector and for a lot of farmers from not just South Australia—the South-East, the Mallee, Bordertown or towards Mount Gambier—but also the western districts of Victoria. I know we have people from those areas come to Murray Bridge because, like me, they are not entirely enthralled with being in the city, and they can be in Murray Bridge and surrounding areas and be within an hour of vital services.

What will happen in the future, and what I like about the Gifford Hill proposal—as I said, some of the land will have to come out of the environment and food production areas—is that this area is being master planned to have schools in place and health facilities, and we will need to look at a new hospital and all the other facilities that are needed, like a high street somewhere near the racing club. It is going to be something that, once it is full noise, will be triple the size that Murray Bridge is now. Murray Bridge has about 22,000 people now, and it will be at least triple the size when it is all done.

We will certainly need other upgrades like exits and access to the freeway; that is always something that needs to happen. Obviously, in the near future we do need that Greater Adelaide Freight Bypass in line with the duplication of the Swanport Bridge as well. So it certainly is an opportunity, and I hope it has a far better outcome than Monarto did. Everything is pointing that way, but nothing is there until it is there.

Obviously, in some parts there is rezoning to be done and that sort of thing. There is obviously this legislation around taking some land out of the environment and food production area. Certainly, for my end of the state, I think it is the right place with coordinating the use of agricultural land and also the ability to grow Murray Bridge and surrounding area as a great area that could eventually be something like Ballarat is to Melbourne. That is a long way off, and I will have to be very old if I am going to see it, but it is an opportunity and we just have to get it right.

One thing I stress is we need to make sure that we can coexist and have the right buffers in place for those agricultural industries, whether they are primary production or those processing industries like Costa mushrooms, to make sure that we can all coexist and move into the future, because if we are going to have these jobs and this employment land we need to make it work with the development. I commend the bill.