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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 7 Hansard (5 June) . . Page.. 1968 ..

MS DUNNE (continuing):

of losing all this forever. We know how pressing these issues are but we lack the appropriate means to go on from that realisation. Because of this the opposition supports and welcomes the broad thrust of the motion put forward by Ms Tucker, and I will address the amendments later in the piece.

There is little doubt that our constitutional arrangements have failed in terms of water policy. As far as I am concerned, they have been a discernible impediment to developing a cohesive and holistic approach to water resources management. I think that realisation really dawned on us back in the early 1980s that an important part of the solution lay in significant policy and institutional changes that were part of the COAG water reform framework. This was no mean feat in that it brought about agreement across jurisdictions in February 1994.

In many ways these ventures have been a triumph of hope over experience. Just a couple of months ago we saw at the launch of the Australian State of the Environment Report the grim news that "institutional arrangements are often a barrier to effective environment and heritage management". This was the view of the Australian State of the Environment Report.

Whilst we should not underestimate the work that is done by institutions like the Murray-Darling Basin Commission, I believe that it is hopelessly mired in interstate politics and rivalries that make effective decision-making impossible. The commission writes its own dire warnings but it does not seem to act upon them.

The principal impediment to decision-making in the initiative is the requirement for unanimity. Each member has a Jagellonian veto, which means that only a bias towards the status quo is acceptable. The practical effects of all these constitutional arrangements under the Murray-Darling Basin Commission and its forerunners have been a series of locks and weirs and the increasing engineering of the Murray-Darling Basin scheme. In 1939 there were 10 dams with the capacity of 100 gigalitres or more, but by 1994 that had increased to 90.

Environmental flows have only recently come to our notice as a measure of the health of our river systems and discussion of desirable levels makes for hot political debate. Even at the Corowa conference, which the minister has just referred to, I believe that the commission wimped out. Again, we are having more consultation and more conversation and it is time to grasp the issues.

In the ACT we should be proud of the fact that successive governments have elected to leave 90 per cent of environmental flows in the river. By contrast, it is estimated that less than 20 per cent of the water in the Murray-Darling system actually reaches the sea. It is estimated that we need to restore at least 40 per cent of the environmental flows before we can begin to make an impact on the health of our rivers, and that message is not being well received by thirsty farmers along the course of our mighty rivers.

There seems to me to be a mentality that some of us might just want to just keep farming and keep doing what we do until the salt breaks through and there is nothing left to farm. One renowned water engineer, Emeritus Professor Lance Endersbee, has gone so far as to say there has been "over a century of serious error" in regard to the management of the

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