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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 07 Hansard (Tuesday, 29 June 2004) . . Page.. 2895 ..

achieve is of monumental significance not only to this country but also to other countries around the world.

I remember speaking with Kader Asmal who was, at one stage, the federal minister for water in South Africa. In that role, given his knowledge and the respect his peers held for him, he was also president of the International Dam Commission. The whole question of whether rivers should be dammed and flows controlled is not something that only Australia is discussing. In meetings with Kader Asmal some years ago I can remember his great delight when we got to the issue of water. He said, “Of course, you’re on the Murray-Darling!” He knew an awful lot about it.

All the international bodies and all the South African national bodies he was involved with were monitoring what we did. When we talk about reduce, reuse and recycle, we are using words and catchphrases that are being taken up around the world. We are being watched from around the world because, in many ways, we lead in the management of the catchment in the Murray-Darling Basin.

The impact on a city like Canberra has been outlined by Mrs Dunne. I want to take a slightly different tack and look at the effect of what the mismanagement of Canberra’s water supply does, beyond our lifestyle. It gets into aesthetics; it gets into the look of the city. That has an impact on how we feel about ourselves, which I suspect has an impact on things like crime. It has an impact, therefore, on investment; it has an impact on things like job creation; it has an impact on things like tourism—and of course that all impacts on the economic viability of the ACT.

At a personal level Canberrans have invested heavily in their personal properties, expecting that there would always be enough water to keep their gardens alive. That might be a false expectation, or it might be an expectation that has to be changed. You only have to look at the progress over the past 40 years of the free plant scheme. I think it would be fair to say that, 30 or 40 years ago, a lot of the plants being issued were inappropriate.

My parents arrived here in 1969 and, as a family, built a new house in Curtin. We were issued with inappropriate native species that did not grow well or, in the conditions here, tended to do silly things like dropping branches, dying at a certain age or not growing to their full capacity. Canberrans have a right to their gardens and there is an expectation, particularly among older Canberrans, that there will always be adequate water to keep those gardens alive.

In some of the practices that we carry out here in the ACT we must ensure that we do not lose the social amenity of where we live. In the short term the crisis of water restrictions means the loss of lawns, and that is perhaps a price we are prepared to pay, but there is tree stress around the city: we are starting to see the loss of shrubs and trees. In our own garden, which we have attempted to water strategically, a number of our gum trees have been affected. One is dead and another looks like it has gone. Throughout the part of Tuggeranong where I live you can see the stress in the gardens which people are desperately trying to keep alive, having nurtured them for a long period of time.

Further cutbacks in watering, another dry summer and the inability of gum trees to rejuvenate during the winter is likely to kill a significant number of street trees, for

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