Page 2486 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 22 August 2006
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floor, out of Melbourne, that gives much better fuel consumption than most four-cylinder cars and will have a longer life because you are not putting so much stress on the engine because it is a bigger engine. But that option is not available to us or will not become available to people in this territory because of the one-size-fits-all thing. We are not looking at the array of dual-fuel vehicles and we are not looking at any of the smart diesel options that are coming out of the European manufacturers and give us spectacular fuel economy; we are just looking at four-cylinder, petrol. This is not the way an innovative government who is really interested in greenhouse abatement would deal with it.
The other area is water policy. This area has been an area of spectacular failure on the part of the Stanhope government. It is a wing-and-a-prayer policy. We got out of jail a couple of years ago. While the drought is still on us in many ways, we had a couple of good seasons and the dams started to fill again. Our long-term water security is not being addressed by this government, which has made it very clear, as a shareholder of Actew, that it does not want to be told anything about major infrastructure and does not want to be told that really the answer in the long term is that we will have to build another water storage.
One of the reasons we will have to build another water storage is quite simply that all the climate projections tell us that we will have less rain and it will come in much larger episodes, so that we will have big, torrential downpours, with big spaces of dries between them. If we do not have the capacity to collect the water and store it when it arrives in big, torrential downpours, we will constantly be faced with more and more stringent water restrictions which will be, generally speaking, a bind on the operation of every person in the ACT. It will be a brake on the economy and will be a brake on the economy not only in Canberra but also across the region. We do not have a Canberra water strategy, an ACT water strategy, let alone a regional water strategy.
I note that eventually everyone signed off on the cross-border MOU on Canberra water. The Chief Minister gave an undertaking during the estimates process that, when it was signed off and finalised, members of the Assembly would be provided with a copy of that. If the news reports are correct and it is now finalised, I ask the Chief Minister whether he could live up to that commitment and provide members of the Assembly with a copy of that, as he undertook. That will save me writing him a letter.
The other issue that we need to look at—and I think Mr Mulcahy may have touched upon this—is the water extraction charge. For as long as I have been a member of this place, I have been asking questions of the ICRC, successive Treasurers, the Chief Minister and the heads of the utility about the legality of the water extraction charge. One of the major tax planks this year is an increase in the water extraction charge of some 30c, taking the water extraction charge up to 55c per kilolitre. This is a huge charge, and a huge fixed charge, for all ACT taxpayers. It does not matter whether you are a homeowner, a business owner or a renter, you will pay that charge. It will be a big impost, depending on your water usage, particularly on families.
To date, I have never had a satisfactory explanation as to the government’s use of the water extraction charge. The Chief Minister almost came clean in estimates, when I asked him how he would be spending the proceeds of the water extraction charge and he said, “Very carefully.” I thought that he might be getting the message that there are
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