Page 1961 - Week 06 - Thursday, 8 June 2006
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that is the nice environmental word—of the Chief Minister. When he was the minister for the environment we saw a $6 million decline in spending on the environment.
What do we have? We have the arboretum, the vanity project that the minister insists on. He does not have the ticker to axe this program, but we are actually cutting it back. The big tree park that we talked about last year is now a little tree park. But the Chief Minister just cannot bring himself to mention it. In his press release issued with the budget he referred to the arboretum as a tree museum. We fell about the place—
Mr Barr: It’s a tribute to Joni Mitchell.
MRS DUNNE: You pre-empted me, Mr Barr. You have only to think of Joni Mitchell:
They took all the trees
And put them in a tree museum
And they charged all the people
A dollar and a half just to see ’em.
Mr Stanhope wanted to charge us 25 bucks to see the trees in his tree museum. But, really, when we are talking about the environment, we have to look at the water abstraction charge. The water abstraction charge is a rapacious increase to a charge which is already particularly on the nose for people. It is an increase, at one stroke of the pen, from 25 cents per kilolitre to 55 cents per kilolitre. In anybody’s parlance, that is a 120 per cent increase, literally overnight. This comes on top of the increase in Actew’s water tariffs to $1.47 a kilolitre. It means that consumers will now pay up to $2.29 a kilolitre.
This 120 per cent rip-off comes without any inquiry by the Independent Competition and Regulatory Commission, which just completed an inquiry into water prices. This 120 per cent rip-off comes despite the fact that the ICRC has already cast doubts upon the legal validity of this so-called water extraction charge.
We have to ask the question: why have this minister and this government consistently refused access by this opposition to the legal advice about the validity of the water extraction charge? Any doubt that we ever had that the water extraction charge was not an excise was blown out of the water the other day when, with one stroke of the pen, the minister increased the charge by 120 per cent.
Consumers are already angered by being forced to pay more for water to make up for the revenue lost by Actew and the government through the unnecessary water restrictions. I do say that during the last drought the water restrictions were unnecessary. They could have been less draconian. But we have to remember that all through the period 96 per cent of the water collected in the ACT went down the river to rice growers. Are rice growers more deserving than we are?
We have to wonder how this helps the environment. Why were our trees and parks destroyed, and what is the Chief Minister doing about this? The level of anger that I see and experience amongst people in the community whose lifetime of contributions to this city and to their gardens has culminated in dead and dying trees and gardens is palpable.
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