Page 3358 - Week 11 - Thursday, 22 September 1994
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Madam Speaker, it is important that we continue to pursue that; but fundamental and simple questions remain to be answered, and they must be answered. How much development are we going to have? Where is it going to happen, and when is it going to happen? Those are the fundamental questions that have to be asked, and that is the challenge for this Minister - to ensure that those questions are answered appropriately. They are simple questions to ask. They are, of course, particularly complicated questions to answer. Although the Planning Authority received a landscape architect award, and congratulations to it - I think we all share in congratulations for any award that our public servants are given - it still has to answer those challenges. It has not done so. Even though, as Mr Wood correctly pointed out, I supported the Territory Plan, I did express reservations on those issues, and on its lack of a strategy. A strategy has to answer those questions. I have continued to raise that issue. Mr Stefaniak, no doubt, will remember that I raised it in the last Assembly, prior to the last election. I will continue raising that issue because it is a critical one.
Madam Speaker, I would now like to move on to the natural environment. Following the report of the Commissioner for the Environment, the issue of feral animals and invasive plants has been raised. Ms Ellis first raised the issue of the need to cull kangaroos. It is a vexed question. It was then supported appropriately by Mr Stefaniak. This has been the subject of a report of this Assembly in which the unanimous view was that, when a species such as the grey kangaroo that is flooding rural areas around the ACT is totally out of balance with the rest of the environment, it is going to be necessary for us to take a hard decision. It is a decision that carries with it a great deal of emotion. That is why it ought not be just simply a decision of the Minister for the Environment. I was pleased to be a member of the Environment Committee - in fact I chaired it - that recommended the need to take steps to very carefully go about culling kangaroos. None of us take any pleasure from the thought that we may have to take this action, but it does have to be taken because we have an environment that is out of balance.
Madam Speaker, I would like also today to raise the issue of water conservation. It is an issue that I have raised on a number of occasions. I remind members that water is a renewable resource. We must deal with water in a very different way from the way that we might deal with other elements of our environment which produce waste, and other elements of our environment, such as petroleum products and other fossil fuels which are non-renewable resources. Water is a renewable resource and the Commissioner for the Environment tells us that we have sufficient storage capacity in our existing reservoirs to provide water for a population of 400,000. That view was based on average water use over the previous year. We have now put into place further conservation measures. I believe that over the next few years we will see that we will have enough water in storage, because of a sensible approach to our water, to take us through to a population of 500,000 or more. We do not expect to reach that population, according to demographic projections, Madam Speaker, for at least 15 years, and probably longer. We have to take great care, when dealing with water, that we recognise that it is a renewable resource.
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