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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 07 Hansard (Thursday, 1 July 2004) . . Page.. 3109 ..

ACT, we have reduced the environmental flows in the Googong catchment to less than one per cent of annual average rainfall.

The objects of the ACT Water Resources Act are:

• to ensure that the use and management of water resources of the territory sustain the physical, economic and social wellbeing of the people of the territory while protecting ecosystems that depend on those resources;

• to protect waterways and aquifers from damage and, where practical, to reverse damage that has already occurred; and

• to ensure water resources are able to meet the reasonably foreseeable needs of future generations.

The principal tool for this in the act is the water resources management plan, so we need to look carefully at whether “Think water, act water” should be regarded as a water resources management plan. I look at it as follows:

• “Think water, act water” cannot be regarded as a water resources management plan because it does not plan resource development to meet the future needs of the people of Canberra.

• “Think water, act water” cannot be regarded as a water resources management plan because it fails to identify the impact of restricted environmental flows, climate change, catchment regeneration and drought.

• “Think water, act water” cannot be regarded as a water resources management plan because in a climate of diminishing rainfall it has produced estimated catchment statistics that have increased water resources in some catchments by over 157 per cent while reducing other catchments by up to 40 per cent.

• “Think water, act water” cannot be regarded as a water resources management plan because it ignores the existing joint working group, made up of federal, state and ACT governments, that is already in place to discuss cross-border water related issues.

• “Think water, act water” cannot be regarded as a water resources management plan because it fails to provide verifiable population projections from its current water infrastructure.

Here is an interesting point. The water supply augmentation plan, which was the precursor to much of the documentation we are discussing, talks about the estimated population that would be supplied by the Corin, Bendora and Googong dams. When the water supply augmentation plan was put together, it was estimated that Corin, Bendora and Googong dams would supply 414,000 people using 713 litres of water per person per day.

But today, the average water consumption in the ACT is 498 litres per person per day. We have reduced our water consumption by in excess of 200 litres per person per day since the late 1970s. On that basis, the existing water infrastructure of Googong, Bendora and Corin should support a population of 539,000 people. However, depending on which set of figures you look at—anything but the government’s figures; a 20 per cent loss of run-off is expected by the Bureau of Meteorology—when we look at what is going on in a variety of places as a result of the bushfires, we could expect that our resource could decrease in the next few years, especially when we add to that the drought, by as much as

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