Page 3170 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 17 October 2006
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while we are talking about securing a water supply for the future, we can look at everything except the possibility of building a dam. One of the things that we have seen in this debate is an absolute, complete reluctance on the part of the government to engage in the issue of whether we actually need another dam.
I will come back to that. But, before I leave the Cotter-Googong bulk transfer system, the minister has said that we are now in a situation, or very soon will be in a situation, whereby we will be able to transfer from one catchment to another a third of our actual water supply needs in each year. That is fine while ever the Cotter catchment is producing at its current level. But, from the government’s documentation and other documentation elsewhere, we know that by five years after the 2003 fires—2008—the productivity of the Cotter catchment will decline radically as the vegetation that is regrowing following the fires really takes hold and that vegetation takes up considerably more water than is currently the case, as was definitely the case before the fires.
The science is unclear and we do not know exactly but, if you just read the government’s documentation, from year 5 after the fires to year 20 or 25 after the fires we can expect to see about a 25 per cent reduction in the outflow from the Cotter catchment. We have just spent $70 million so that we can siphon water out of the Cotter catchment into the Googong catchment but, beginning in 2008, we may not have enough water to siphon. That will be $70 million that will go to waste. It will be $70 million for a project which will be effective for only five years. That is why I criticise the Stanhope government for its failure of policy.
Getting back to whether we should build a dam, one of the things that all the climate change science tells us, if you believe the models, is that we will see less rainfall, which is a matter of considerable concern. Everyone here today has touched upon that. The other thing that we will see is that there will be bigger gaps between the rainfall and when you actually have rainfall you will have big downpours, big rain events. If you do not have the capacity to trap and store that when it occurs, we will have long-term water security issues. The issue is that, if you have big events with long spaces in between, you need to have more water storage capacity—more water storage capacity than we currently have.
The projections for water storage and our demands on water done by Actew were by Actew’s own admission, before they were got at a bit by the government, that we would need a new dam by 2017. Evidence was given to committees in this place in the early stages of 2003 that by 2017 we would need a dam. Somewhere along the line, someone has got at them and they have decided that they do not need to do that. But the population projections remain the same and the storage capacities of our dams remain the same.
If all our dams are full—they are not full now and the prospects of them being full before 2008 or 2017 are not great—all that points to is that we will need to harvest another catchment. The Cotter catchment is highly at risk of becoming unproductive in the way that the Googong catchment has become. The issues in relation to why the Googong catchment has become unproductive have not been addressed by this Chief Minister. The principal reason that the Googong catchment is not as productive as it once was is that there is too much extraction of groundwater, there are too many bores, there are too many surface dams and the runoff that we used to have no longer comes into the river
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