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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1998 Week 10 Hansard (26 November) . . Page.. 3097 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

However, there are significant aspects of this Bill which I have major problems with. It is interesting that the need to have legislation on water management has only been identified recently. I assume that this is because up until recent years the management of water has been regarded as the prime responsibility of government. Government built the dams and government utilities treated and piped the water throughout the community. This idea has, however, been overtaken in recent years by the rise of economic fundamentalism which believes that it is more efficient to have essential services like water and energy traded as a commodity through markets involving private companies.

This legislation reflects this approach by not only regulating the taking of water from ACT waterways but also establishing a market for water where allocations of water can be sold off to the highest bidder who can then trade their allocations with others, not just in the ACT but interstate. In theory, somebody could buy our water here but then take this water out of the Murrumbidgee River downstream from the ACT.

The Greens reject this aspect of the Bill. Water is a vital natural resource that is necessary for our very survival. The Government has a responsibility to manage our water resources well for the benefit not just of the present community but for future generations of Canberrans. The Government also has a responsibility to take a total catchment management approach to water to ensure that the environment as a whole is not degraded from excessive water-taking.

While we accept that there may be a place for improved efficiencies in how water is treated and distributed, we cannot accept that the availability of water should be handed over to the marketplace and that private companies with commercial objectives should be making decisions which affect the environment of our rivers and the availability of water to the community. It is our belief that the supply of water is a natural monopoly that can only be turned into a private market at the expense of the loss of control over environmental and social outcomes regarding water use. This whole Bill is really an attempt to integrate environmental and social outcomes into the water market concept, and we have grave doubts whether this can occur in practice.

The water market idea rests on the assumption that there is a surplus of water in our rivers available for sale beyond what is required to maintain the so-called environmental flow of those rivers - that is, an amount of water that will maintain the natural aquatic ecosystem of a river. However, there is considerable uncertainty about what are the environmental flows of rivers in the Murray-Darling Basin. It is only in recent years, with the increasing amount of irrigated land being opened up in the basin and the subsequent degradation of farmland and waterways, that governments have realised that there has to be a cap on water use. Water is not an unlimited resource.

The Government is asking us to accept on faith that they can accurately calculate the environmental flows of waterways in the ACT to enable this market to operate effectively, but we believe that considerable technical work still needs to be done on this subject. We believe that a precautionary approach is necessary to protect our vital water resources. We do not want the situation arising where the ACT Government sells off all our water and then realises that they have sold off too much.

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