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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 07 Hansard (Tuesday, 29 June 2004) . . Page.. 2894 ..

but they are very modest targets indeed. We will not achieve even those unless we embrace all the issues we need to embrace.

I find it interesting that the Chief Minister has been able to sign off on the COAG agreement on the National Water Initiative, which talks about trade in water, secure access, entitlements, sophisticated transparent and comprehensive water planning and stakeholder consultation, when in the ACT he is presiding over the opposite. He is presiding over command and control, deep suspicion of market and financial incentives; and he has deep suspicion of community consultation. Do you remember the community consultation where you had to ring up and get permission to come, before they would tell you where you were?

There is quite a contrast between what the Chief Minister is doing on the national stage and what he is doing here. We need to have better planning and the kind of consultation that is more than stage-managed within an inch of it is life and stacked out by public servants to produce predetermined outcomes, indicating that everyone wants the approach the government has chosen in advance. The whole problem is that the community is still complaining to me about the fact that their views were not taken into consideration in that consultation.

Today we heard the Chief Minister talk about the fire damage and the reduction of run-off in the catchments as a result of the January 2003 bushfires. We have to take responsibility for that because not only does it affect us in the ACT, it also affects every crop grower, every rice grower and every person who lives in any small town between here and the Murray mouth.

What we did, or failed to do, in January 2003 will have long-term repercussions not just for our water supply but also for the water supply of everyone who lives in the Murray-Darling Basin downstream of the ACT. We need to hang our heads in shame because we did not act decisively enough and we are now reaping the whirlwind of that indecisiveness. We are now confronted with the possibility of having to spend $150 million to build a water supply that may not have been needed, except for the vandalism of January 2003.

MR SMYTH (Leader of the Opposition) (4.11): I rise to support Mrs Dunne on this excellent motion. The impact of Canberra as the major urban centre on the Murray-Darling Basin is not important just to us, as the largest city in the basin; it is not important just to the basin itself, which is really the heartland of Australian agriculture; but there is also significant interest around the world as to what we do. In respect of the management of the entire catchment—and your view might vary as to whether it has been good, bad, indifferent or in the middle somewhere—it is considered around the world to be probably the best managed water catchment of this size and kind in the world, the most progressive in terms of the reinforcement by each of the jurisdictions involved, and that the only way to make it work effectively is to do it together.

The interesting thing is that countries like South Africa—other southern hemisphere countries—that have similar problems to ours, given that the cycle that we have also affects them, watch with great interest the leadership that some of the urban centres are also showing. Premier among those urban centres in the Murray-Darling catchment is, of course, the ACT and the city of Canberra. What we say, what we do and what we

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