Page 614 - Week 02 - Thursday, 21 February 1991
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MRS GRASSBY, by leave: Mr Speaker, this is yet another example of this Government's incompetent handling of the provision of public swimming facilities for the people of Canberra. It needs to be pointed out from the start that the Casuarina Sands recreational swimming area is one of only a handful of free swimming areas in the ACT available to the public.
I was surprised to read in the Canberra Times on Sunday, 3 February this year, that Mr Duby had approved a proposal to demolish the weir at Casuarina Sands. As the shadow Minister for Urban Services, I would have liked to have had some prior warning about this decision in the spirit of consultation and cooperation promised recently by Mr Collaery, but such was not the case. If the Minister had done so, I can assure you, Mr Speaker, that I could have informed him that he was being sold a lemon.
It needs to be understood that the function of the weir at Casuarina Sands is to build the water up some 1.5 metres in depth behind it. In doing so, it creates a truly beautiful swimming area which the people of Canberra have enjoyed for some 29 years. To demolish the weir is to return that section of the Murrumbidgee River to little more than a trickle. Consequently, to demolish the weir is to kill Casuarina Sands as a recreational swimming area for the people of this Territory.
Mr Speaker, let us have a look at the public argument which Mr Duby has proposed to support the demolition of the weir. Firstly, there is the suggestion that the weir is unsafe because there have been nine fatalities in the area since 1962. The suggestion that nine people have died in the Casuarina Sands area since the construction of the weir in 1962 I find largely misleading. Of those nine fatalities, it is my understanding that only four can be attributed in any way to the weir. Moreover, and this point needs to be made very clear, these four fatalities occurred during flood periods. Consequently, Mr Speaker, it appears as if the weir has become the scapegoat, and we all know that a scapegoat is never the real source of the trouble. Quite simply, the danger at Casuarina Sands is flood conditions. It is certainly not the weir. The cause of the fatalities was the floods, not the weir.
If one compares these four fatalities to fatalities in other swimming areas in the ACT since 1962, then I feel the facts tell a very different story. You no doubt are aware that there have been seven deaths in Lake Burley Griffin, three at Pine Island, three in the Molonglo River and two at the Cotter Reserve in this same period. Should a decision be made to go ahead with the demolition of Casuarina Sands weir, then I will be waiting for the next logical step which must be to close down those other swimming areas that I have mentioned, and that means draining the whole of Lake Burley Griffin.
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