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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 7 Hansard (24 June) . . Page.. 2360 ..

MRS DUNNE

The bushfire also highlighted, as far as I can see, some issues of demarcation that we need to address. The one that I am particularly concerned about is the role-not necessarily a conflicting role, but a not absolutely synchronised role-of Actew and Environment ACT when it comes to catchment management. The current situation is a longstanding one and I do not attribute any blame to it but, now that we have seen how things work, perhaps we should be revisiting it. As things currently stand, Environment ACT is the land manager in the catchment area and Actew's responsibility starts at the waterline: Actew looks after the water, Environment ACT looks after the land.

I think that this relationship is one which, with all the best will in the world, has not served us as well as it could, because we have been focusing on the catchment in terms of land management issues and not in terms of water issues. We have seen in the last few days that the precious and most important resource in the ACT after our land and our people is in jeopardy for decades to come. We have been told by the experts that it will take in excess of 20 years, closer to 30 years, for us to have anything like proper regeneration. Until that happens, every time it rains we will have problems of turbidity in the Bendora-Corin-Cotter system.

There have been lessons about bushfire fuel management and there have been lessons about access to remote areas like that that we have not learnt in the past and I hope that we will learn them now, because we have had media reports today from CSIRO experts, I think, pointing out that our Googong catchment is also at risk of fire and the possibility of arsenic contamination from Captains Flat. They are all things that could affect the Googong catchment. What would happen if, in two, three or four bushfire seasons, we had a devastating bushfire that ravaged the Googong catchment? Where would we be then?

The Commonwealth set us up very nicely with water supplies to meet our needs for decades to come and, at the moment, these precious resources are very much under threat. Although the government is doing some things, it would seem tardily, it is still not doing enough. At this stage, this government seems to have no policy for water efficiency. There are no water efficiency measures, except in the most abstract terms, being talked about by this government. We have to have a concerted effort from today to turn around and harness the goodwill of people in the ACT who have responded so well to water restrictions and have done their bit, as much as they can, to recycle water and to reuse water.

An instance of that is that, over the drought period and through the summer, every time the hardware stores got in supplies of the equipment for diverting washing water from a sink to outside they sold out quickly, simply because people were committed to recycling and reusing water. I heard Ms Tucker say yesterday that the notion of reusing grey water is still a bit esoteric. I agree with her because, for the most part, the technology is not available to us.

There are many ways to skin this cat and we will probably have to have many mechanisms for using grey water technology, but I agree with Ms Tucker's statement yesterday, I think it was, that we should not be using our highly valuable potable water for watering our lawns, watering our gardens and a whole range of things like

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