Page 2032 - Week 07 - Thursday, 16 June 1994
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Either you can let ACTEW continue to get away with this or you can actually do something that is really appropriate for the Canberra community and that puts ACTEW on notice that we are not going to tolerate that sort of business, and support this motion to disallow the determination.
The Minister must accept some responsibility for this determination, but at the same time we recognise that the Minister has been in his portfolio for only a small part of the time during which this whole thing has been prepared. I do not consider it as important to take on this Minister as it is to take on ACTEW and its responsibility. They are the ones that have really stuffed it up. They are the ones that want to be seen to be a business enterprise. What a shocker of a business it would be, if this is the calibre of the work they do! Members, I urge you to support this disallowance motion.
MS SZUTY (10.57): Madam Speaker, my colleague Mr Moore has not proposed this disallowance motion for the Assembly's consideration lightly. Both Mr Moore and I consider the issue of water conservation to be an issue of the highest importance and significance to the Territory and to the people of the ACT. However, we disagree with the process and the mechanism by which ACTEW wants to change water pricing arrangements in the ACT. I wish to concentrate my remarks on the disallowance motion in two areas. First, I want to talk about the paper ACT Future Water Supply: Summary of Draft Strategy of December 1993 and I then want to move on to talk about the independent survey commissioned by ACTEW to affirm or confirm the water pricing arrangements that ACTEW is seeking to put in place.
Madam Speaker, before turning to these two issues in detail, I would like to state at the outset that I have always felt uncomfortable with total user pays systems, particularly as they apply to areas of fundamental importance to each and every person in the community. One of these areas must be considered to be water. I believe that I have a difference of view with my colleague Mr Moore on precisely what needs to occur in the future. However, we both agree that the current arrangements as they are proposed are just simply not adequate.
It is obvious, in the first instance, that under a user pays system households with larger numbers of family members will be more adversely affected than others. Where have we heard that before? Who remembers the infamous poll tax which the Conservative Government in Britain wanted to apply to people in that country? The poll tax, of course, was an issue that penalised individuals living in households, not households themselves. It was loathed and detested by the community in Britain and was subsequently defeated as an issue. I believe that ACTEW's attempts to change water pricing arrangements have some analogies to the imposition of the poll tax in Great Britain. The Government has also recently acknowledged that pensioners will be disadvantaged under the new arrangements by introducing measures in the Rates and Land Rent (Relief) (Amendment) Bill 1994 which will prevent too great a disadvantage being felt by pensioners. This measure alone is worth $140,000, by Government calculations.
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