Page 2877 - Week 09 - Thursday, 18 August 2005
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
MR STANHOPE (Ginninderra—Chief Minister, Attorney-General, Minister for the Environment and Minister for Arts, Heritage and Indigenous Affairs) (11.32): I just wish to make the point, Dr Foskey, that the legislation has no retrospective application. It does not affect an existing licence holder at all. There is no impact at all on existing licence holders. The impact is prospective. The review will simply affect, in the future, the way in which we make decisions around the granting of licences. We are looking, as I indicated, for a way of ensuring that the greater good, the community benefit, would be met through an allocation of leases, rather than the ad hoc first come, best dressed approach that currently applies. I am making the point about a way in the future to allow us to look at whether watering a school oval is a higher order use than the private use of a very limited and increasingly valuable resource. There is no retrospective effect: the proposal, the moratorium, will not impact on any existing licence holders.
Dr Foskey: Sorry, I got the wrong impression.
MR STANHOPE: Yes, we all did.
MRS DUNNE (Ginninderra) (11.33): It is also important to note about these amendments that the government has admitted that it does not know anything or it knows very little about the water resource. This has been a failure of government over a very long period, and not just a failure of this government. The water resources legislation has been in operation since 1998 or 1999, I cannot remember exactly when, and the issue of ground water was important at the time this legislation was passed. I remember the late Gary Crostin briefing me on the importance of ground water and how little we knew about the ground water processes.
I think it has been a failing of successive governments—I do not have a problem with saying so—that we have waited until we have got to a crisis before saying, “What are we going to do about our ground water? What is there and what do we know?” We need to put that in perspective because, when the Chief Minister and Minister for the Environment says that our ground water in some catchments in the urban areas is completely allocated or all but allocated, we do not know exactly how much ground water we have.
We know it is not a vast amount, like that in the Great Artesian Basin. Madam Acting Deputy Speaker, you know that I am a person who considers that we have to be very cautious about these things, and I have spoken at length on a number of occasions about the importance of preserving ground water, particularly in the Great Artesian Basin. We are talking about a body of water that is held in the ground. When the minister talks about its being overallocated, he is talking about the top 10 per cent of that water being available for extraction. We do not know exactly how big that body of water is.
The Chief Minister might be giving the impression that all of that water is being extracted, but that is not the case. It is the top 10 per cent that is available for extraction through bores and through the collection of surface water, and that is all. Let us say that 700 megalitres falls into a catchment every year. There is then 70 megalitres available for extraction. The Chief Minister and Minister for the Environment is saying that for a particular catchment we may be getting close to extracting 70 megalitres a year. Yes, it is on a first come, first served basis but that is how we do a whole lot of things in public
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .