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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1998 Week 10 Hansard (26 November) . . Page.. 3103 ..

MR SMYTH (continuing):

Mr Kaine also spoke about rural lessees. Rural lessees will retain their existing water rights, but so far they exist in a legislative vacuum. You could almost say we have a totally privatised system now because the private owners currently take what water they want. In fact, this puts water released under government control for the first time in the ACT. Ms Tucker might think we are privatising it, but you could almost say we are nationalising water. We are giving control back to the people of the ACT through this Assembly. In the future, if rural lessees want additional bulk water they will have to pay for it, and that is consistent with the rest of Australia. Only the ACT has free bulk water and we need to have this legislation in place so that we can manage the water resources properly.

Ms Tucker raised the issue of trading. I am sure trading and allocation will be the key issue today, and I hope I can convince all members that they should support this. Mr Deputy Speaker, no water will be traded outside the ACT without the approval of this Assembly. Until the ACT is satisfied that the trading provides benefits for the Territory, trading of allocations will not be allowed outside the ACT. This will be done by a requirement in the water resources management plan that allocations to be created must include a condition not allowing them to be traded interstate.

Mr Deputy Speaker, in the process for disallowance of the water resources management plan, the community will be given the opportunity to comment and then, through the members of this Assembly, they will be able to ensure themselves that there is adequate protection from interstate trading.

Ms Tucker also mentioned environmental flow guidelines. Environmental flow guidelines, she said, would be fine if we get it right in the ACT, but what happens when it goes interstate? That is a very important question and it is something that the States have avoided answering. I am pleased to say that at the ANZAAS conference in Wellington on 12 June this year Dorothy Kotz, the South Australian Minister for the Environment, and I were able to get on the agenda for the December meeting a paper that would discuss having consistent flow guidelines across all States and Territories. For the first time we will be comparing apples with apples instead of apples with oranges, which is currently going on. I think the ANZAAS paper will be very interesting and I look forward to the December meeting.

I think we need to look at the system as it currently is in New South Wales simply because New South Wales is moving to where we will be when this Bill is passed. Currently, in New South Wales, they have allocated 115 per cent of the water flow in the Murrumbidgee. They have allocated more than exists, and this is because of a failure of their licensing system. Their licensing system has given away allocations over the years to various individuals. There are three sorts of users of these allocations. There are those who use it wisely. There are sleeper licences which are never used. People hold these licences and they are locking away part of the valuable resource that water is for their own use, but they never use it. Then there are sorts of dozing licensees who only use them sometimes.

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