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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 07 Hansard (Thursday, 1 July 2004) . . Page.. 3115 ..

government making a firm commitment to a dam, the longer it leaves it, the better it is for all.

As a nation, we have already extracted so much water from the Murray Darling River system that the mouth of the Murray frequently closes. We have made the Murray cod an endangered species, and we have dramatically reduced populations of water birds that depend on extended floods for breeding. We have allowed the remaining flows to become sluggish and polluted.

We cannot delude ourselves that the water that flowed into the ocean before we started to build the countless dams in the Murray catchment was wasted water. The river ecosystems evolved with these large, flushing flows, and our dams reduce or prevent these floods, which are ecologically vital for keeping salinity and suspended nutrient levels low and keeping our rivers from choking on sediment.

I share Mrs Dunne’s disappointment with this strategy, and she made the very good point that it is just an aspirational document that does not commit us to very strong targets for the future. That being said, I do not think that we should throw the baby out with the bathwater, and I cannot go so far as to support a motion of disallowance of this strategy.

It being 45 minutes after the commencement of the Assembly business, the debate was interrupted in accordance with standing order 77. Ordered that the time allottee to Assembly business be extended by 30 minutes.

MS TUCKER (11.27): The Greens will not be supporting Mrs Dunne’s disallowance motion today. Mrs Dunne’s argument in favour of disallowing the plan—as we understood it before, with the briefing—was that it did not meet the requirements of the act, although in her presentation this morning she has moved wider than that in her argument. I am assuming that she is still saying that it does not meet the requirements of the act?

Mrs Dunne: Yes.

MS TUCKER: But you did not talk about that very much. I will respond to that first. The water resources management plan, this time titled “Think water, act water”, is required under the Water Resources Act 1998. Part 5 of the act sets out the requirements for the plan. Section 19 in particular sets out the requirements for content of the plan. I would like to go through the requirements set out in section 19, because I do not agree that the plan falls so far short of these statutory requirements that we should disallow it. I certainly have sympathy with the concerns that Mrs Dunne has raised in her presentation this morning. We have already had the same thing being said in a debate this week on the MPI, put up by Mrs Dunne.

Subsection 19(a) requires “a description of the water resources of the Territory including the flows required to meet the environmental needs of individual waterways or aquifers or parts of individual waterways or aquifers”. Table 4 on page 10 of volume 3 of the plan begins to address this requirement. This table lists the individual waterways in the catchment, together with, for the ACT, New South Wales and the Commonwealth combined, the waterways’ total water resources, environmental allocation and water available for use. For ACT portions of the waterways alone, it lists the total ACT

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