Patrick Conlon has revealed his plan to help Coober Pedy out of administration
A former state government minister has revealed his first focus to get a debt-laden Outback council back on track - and locals say change can’t come fast enough.
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Former state government minister Patrick Conlon has placed fixing Coober Pedy’s decrepit water system on top of his to-do list as he aims to make his position as the town’s administrator redundant.
Mr Conlon, who took over as Coober Pedy administrator in November, told the Sunday Mail he expected the people of the Outback town, about 850km north of Adelaide, would be free to elect a new council at the 2026 local government elections.
Coober Pedy has been without elected representatives since the state government placed the town’s council into the hands of an administrator in 2019 following a much-criticised electricity deal.
But Mr Conlon said finding an external organisation to take over running an ailing, 40-year-old water supply system was his first priority.
“I think someone has to take over the water and there has to be an injection of funds to do the most pressing things there,” he said.
“I’m extremely confident the council itself doesn’t have the internal resources to get the water system back into a non-worrying shape.”
Coober Pedy residents have told the Sunday Mail the town’s water supply has been plagued with constant burst pipes and water costs were triple that paid by the rest of the state. Coober Pedy is the only major town in South Australia where the council, not SA Water, is in charge of supplying its residents with water.
Mr Conlon refused to be drawn on who should take over the water supply but said SA Water would be one of the “more obvious options”.
“They (the council) have looked at private operators before, but the issue you would have is a private operator isn’t going to take it unless someone fixes the assets up first,” he said.
“I think there’s a general acceptance we have to find a solution on things like water, and then if someone else is running the water, we can really get knuckle down into working out what sort of revenues you need to provide, what sort of services out of a council - more like an ordinary municipal council.”
The Coober Pedy council is laden with debt and owes electricity provider EDL $2.5m and the Local Government Finance Authority $7.7m.
Mr Conlon said he was working with a taskforce of senior public servants to investigate what sort of help the State Government could provide to rid the council of its debt.
The council has also been plagued with a revolving door of senior staff, including chief executive officers. But former high-ranking Adelaide City and Onkaparinga council executive Garry Herdegen came out of retirement in August to take over as CEO.
Mr Conlon, a minister in the state Rann and Weatherill Labor governments from 2002 to 2013, said he hoped to work with the Malinauskas government to “make substantial progress” in 2025 towards returning the town to the administration of an elected, self-governing council.
“I’m there for the duration, but my fondest ambition is to sack myself,” he said.
Mr Conlon said federal tourism minister Don Farrell had agreed to visit Coober Pedy early next year.
WHY AUSTRALIA’S OPAL CAPITAL IS ON ITS KNEES
By Paul Ashenden
Coober Pedy, the opal mining capital of Australia, is hurting.
Has been for some years now.
The halcyon days of the 1980 and ’90s, when restaurants and pubs aplenty lined the streets to service a permanent population around 5000, are long gone.
The town’s population has shrunk to 1600, its crime rate is among the highest in regional SA and most of the restaurants from those glory years are no more.
The last remaining bank closed nearly two years ago, a council-run water supply system is falling apart and latest census data points to the average Coober Pedean being among the most disadvantaged in Australia.
Public intoxication on the hot, dusty, unkept streets is common - despite a town-wide dry zone and restrictions on the sale of alcohol. Police numbers are about half of what locals say they need.
Tourist operators are suffering in the wake of Covid, a national cost-of-living crisis and travellers’ concerns about the safety of driving up the highway to visit Alice Springs.
Department for energy and mining figures show the number of registered miners in the Coober Pedy opal fields has dropped from 1000 in 1978 to 663 in 1996 to 339 in 2023.
The tyranny of distance means it can cost a small fortune to bring up a tradie or specialised mechanic from Adelaide.
Over-riding all this is a council laden by debts it has no hope of repaying without state government help - a council placed under control of administrators nearly six years ago after an Ombudsman report uncovered serious maladministration.
This is the scenario facing former State Government minister Patrick Conlon, the new principal administrator of Coober Pedy in November who wants to bring the council out of administration in time for local government elections in November 2026.
His appointment, and that of new chief executive Garry Herdegen, has given locals new hope that there might be a light at the end of the tunnel.
BROKEN WATER PIPES
Justin Freytag, 64, was a councillor who had also run for mayor when then local government minister Stephen Knoll replaced elected members with an administrator in 2019.
Mr Knoll’s decision came on the back of the Ombudsman report that slammed the council’s 2016 decision to sign a 20-year, $198 million hybrid-renewable deal with electricity provider EDL.
Coober Pedy has never been connected to external electricity or water supplies and had previously relied on diesel generators for its power. The new power deal was granted without a tender process but councillors at the time said there was pressure from both state and federal governments to sign quickly.
The council still owes EDL $2.5m and a further $7.7m to the Local Government Finance Authority, who has lent it large sums of money to pay the bills.
Mr Freytag, elected after the power deal was inked, says the dismissal of the council was a “stitch up” and lists fixing the town’s burgeoning debt and dilapidated water supply as Mr Conlon’s first priority.
The price of water per kilolitre in Coober Pedy is three times what SA Water charges throughout the rest of the state and the system is plagued by burst pipes that can leave residents without water for more than a day.
“When they’ve got a major break on the main street, sometimes it drains the big storage tanks and we’ve got no water for 24 hours or even longer,” Mr Fretag, a retired opal miner, says over a coffee in the Downunder Cafe.
“It (the system) wasn’t put in really well - it was just locals without proper materials, and just PVC pipes that have been chucked in the ground and dirt thrown across them - not proper high-pressure pipes.
“And they just burst all the time now - and we lose a lot of water by the time the burst is found.”
The water comes from a bore about 25km out of town via a desalination and reverse osmosis plant. Mr Freytag says it would cost $20m to repair or replace the 40-year-old system.
STOP WASTING MONEY
This is $20m the council doesn’t have and Mr Conlon has earmarked finding a solution to the town’s water dilemma and fixing its financial woes as priorities.
Coober Pedy Alliance chairman John Di Donna is vocal in his condemnation of previous council administrations “wasting” ratepayers’ money.
“We need money - a lot of money,” Mr Di Donna says as we chat at the local rifle club. “The problem is we’ve been six years under administration and the debt has gotten bigger.
“Obviously administration is not working - they haven’t reined in expenditure - they’ve been spending money. Wasting money, a lot of money.
“The community is sick and tired of rates going up and (we get) no services.”
Mr Di Donna, 49, says rates have gone up 33 per cent in the past two years and are more than double what residents pay in a metropolitan suburb such as Parkside.
The IT consultant is also scathing about the council’s wage bill of $4.6m for 48 employees and what he says is a lack of public consultation on major decisions.
And he is concerned that loitering and drinking on the main street is a bad look for a town in which the tourism industry is rivalled only by opal mining as a major economic driver.
“It can be a bit intimidating for tourists - they loiter around the shopping centre and the pub and they’re really loud,” he says.
WE’VE GOT SOLUTIONS
Former Queenslander Paul Howard, 53, moved to Coober Pedy eight years ago and is a member of a council-backed Coober Pedy Together community group elected by residents to lobby for change.
Mr Howard agrees the public drunkenness is unsightly but is effusive in his praise of the town and its people, despite its current economic predicament.
We meet on the lawn of the Big Winch 360, a cafe and cinema experience that boasts one of the few lush, green spaces in town. The outdoor dining area is next door to a Hollywood-style Coober Pedy sign and offers an elevated view of the town’s homes, both above and below ground, and the red dirt in which they sit.
He gestures out to the quiet streets and simply says “that” when I ask him why he chooses to live here in this Outback town, about 850km north of Adelaide and 700km south of Alice Springs.
“You’ve got time to be you here,” he says. “We do have people, I’m happy to say, with mental health issues, that come out here. You don’t have the hustle bustle.
“You don’t have people around you, so you can come here and have your own spot. You can integrate if you want or you can just have your little space.
“You can duck into the IGA first thing in the morning and you won’t have more than four people in a line-up, and they’ll open up another register. It’s just that sort of lifestyle.”
Openly gay and a jack-of-all trades, Mr Howard says he feels “totally accepted” in Coober Pedy, as do other members of the LGBTI+ community. He manages a few bed and breakfasts, does maintenance for a real estate agent, works at the Shell service station on weekends, is a baggage handler at the airport, is a car rental agent and is in the midst of establishing a mental health and aged care services.
“It’s a great town,” he said. “We’ve got solutions. Just sort out that water and get rid of that debt. Sort that out, and we could have an amazing town. We should be much better than we are. Get that communication right. Get the leadership right and take pride in the town.”
MY KIDS ARE SAFE HERE
Third-generation local Jacquie Boland, 43, concedes alcohol-related anti-social behaviour on the town’s main street has worsened in the past few years but insists the safety of living in a small community is one of the town’s great attractions.
“It takes a village to raise a child, and this is the village,” she says when I ask why she loves living here. “It’s like having a thousand aunties, uncles and cousins - we’re just like one big family out here.
“I love knowing my children are safe. They can go walking up and down the street and I’ve got 10 people ringing me up. Everyone is looking out for everybody else, in that respect.”
Ms Boland said she feels safe walking down the street at night and insists her two children Jamie, 13, and Portia, 7, would be exposed to more illegal behaviour in Adelaide than they are in Coober Pedy.
She laments the loss of the town’s last permanent local GP (Dr Ernest Kamitakahara retired a couple of years ago after decades of service) and the fact Tourism SA’s official geographical regions lobs Coober Pedy in the same zone as the Flinders Ranges.
But she hails the town’s low cost of housing (Coober Pedy has a medium house price of $85,000), virtually zero traffic and the fact she can go weeks on end without needing to put petrol in her car.
IT’S A HIDDEN GEM
Coober Pedy is, of course, most famous for underground homes, the opal fields that have created a surreal, moon-like landscape and the terrain that has provided the backdrop to movies and TV Shows ranging from 1985’s Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome to the more recent Outback vampire series Firebrite.
Dan Measey, 47, grew up here. Like his father before him, Mr Measey is a miner, confesses to being “addicted to opal” and appears on the Foxtel show Outback Opal Hunters with partner Renee Everest.
He says the council’s debt level is handcuffing future development and admits the town needs sprucing up to attract more visitors.
“It doesn’t need to be a pretty town… but we probably have to brighten things up a little bit and we can’t do a lot of that while we are in so much debt,” he says in the dining room of his underground home a few kilometres from the main street.
“I guess the main thing I would say to the government is… don’t forget about us. We are important. We do have a few problems here but we are the hub of the north and we’re the opal mining capital of the world.
“We’re still pretty serious. We do a lot for the state and we’ve got big potential. We just need a leg up or a bit of a hand to climb out, because we’ve got a lot to offer. We wouldn’t want to see Coober Pedy fall over, that would be pretty sad.”
He uses an opal mining analogy to urge visitors to make sure they take the time to spend a few days “digging deeper” to unearth the hidden gem of a location rather than just filling up with petrol and driving on up the Stuart Highway.
“It (the town) looks a bit confronting and a bit daunting but the ones who look a bit deeper, who don’t just judge a book by its cover, find there’s a lot more to us.
“So dig deeper, there’s colour under there. Don’t just zip in and zip out. There’s more to us than what you see.
“It’s the most unique place in the world. Find another one like this. Find another place that offers what Coober Pedy does. I don’t believe you will.”
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