Page 4538 - Week 14 - Wednesday, 23 November 2005
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I have to ask the question: what is the motivation of the Stanhope government? On the one hand, we have all these pious platitudes. We have the think water, act water strategy. We have water resources management plans. We have a whole range of initiatives supposedly designed to save using potable water for non-potable purposes. At the same time, again we have the conflict between Stanhope and Corbell because Mr Corbell comes into this place and makes a regulation that allows people to use six per cent more potable water—and for what? For slushing up your garbage and putting it through the sewer into the treatment works.
This is a policy initiative that is counter to the policies espoused by the environment minister when he espouses think water, act water, and it is also a policy which is counter to the policies of the urban services minister, who keeps talking about no waste by 2010. Well, it is not very much waste by 2010.
We know that successive ministers for urban services have had problems in dealing with biowaste and putrescible waste. I think what has happened is that Mr Corbell has found a solution: “We will allow people to scrunch up as much as possible, put it through the sewer and let it be treated in the sewage treatment plant rather than have to be dealt with properly.” Mr Hargreaves cannot find a solution to putrescible waste, so Mr Corbell has found one for him.
What we see in the Water and Sewerage Amendment Regulation (No 1) of 2005 is a turning away from the government’s water efficiency policies. Recently I heard the Chief Minister and Minister for the Environment talking on the radio about the new regulations for installing rainwater tanks. He spoke at great length and with great passion—and I agree with him wholeheartedly—about the need to limit the uses that we have for potable water. He did not think it was reasonable that we should use high-quality water—probably the best water in the country, despite everything that this government has done—to flush our loos. If we can limit that, we should.
At the same time, we have the Minister for Planning saying, “Well, I don’t care. You can flush an extra 55 litres of water down the drain every day, an extra 20 kilolitres of water every day, as a means of getting rid of your kitchen waste, getting rid of your vegetable scraps.” So, instead of putting it in the compost or in some sort of waste bin where Mr Hargreaves could deal with it in a proper way, no, what we will do is mash it up, add water to it and put it down the sewerage into the treatment works.
This is another important measure. One of the reasons that motivated us to move this regulation last year to ban the future installation of in-sink garbage disposal units was the effect that it has on the treatment works. We have probably one of the best inland treatment works in the world, but it is interesting to note that what we have out at the lower Molonglo is an exact copy of Californian technology and it was installed in the 1970s. On the basis of the Californian experience of water projection and water use, it was predicted that we would have to build a new water treatment plant when Canberra’s population reached about 250,000. Now we have extended that, and one of the reasons that the water experts believe that we have extended the life of the current treatment works and we do not have to replicate what we have out there, which would be a very expensive endeavour indeed, is that there is not wide-scale use of in-sink garbage
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