Page 3171 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 17 October 2006
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
system and runs into the Googong dam. There has not been the substantial decline in rainfall that some people say that there has been, but there has been a substantial decline in runoff.
We are seeing a failure of this government to secure a sustainable water future. They have done a number of things. Some of those have been good, but some of them have been just daft. The amount of time, effort and encouragement that this government puts into rainwater tanks and small-scale recycling plants is the wrong appropriation of money. I have done the calculations and I have circulated the calculations time and again. If every Canberra household installed a 10,000-litre tank, the cost in terms of subsidies from the government and outlays by the consumer would be equivalent to the cost of building the Tennent dam.
If every household in the ACT installed a 10,000-litre tank at a cost of somewhere between $3,500 and $5,000, now that the minister requires it to be plumbed back into a house, we would store one per cent of the capacity of the Tennent dam. Economically, encouraging people to put tanks in their backyard is highly inefficient. We have to remember that for that $3,500 to $5,000 outlay for a 10,000-litre tank it costs about $12.50 to fill it up. It is about $12.50 worth of water. If we are talking about the value of water, that is madness.
The government also talks about its wonderful innovations in recycling, but the Chief Minister has already pointed to the fact that the people of the ACT, through the lower Molonglo water quality control scheme, recycle and deliver back into the catchment 50 per cent of the water that they extract upstream, high-quality water, and that has been the practice for a very long time.
As to encouraging people to have their own household-based recycling system, people may feel warm about that and feel that they want to make that contribution—and I would not discourage them from doing so—but it should not be mandated because it would drive up the cost of housing and drive up the cost to families of getting into houses when we already have a much more efficient, a very economic, system of water recycling. Securing a sustainable water supply for our future is an important matter, but I think that the Stanhope government has a long way to go in achieving that.
MR DEPUTY SPEAKER: The time for the debate has expired.
Supreme Court (Judges Pensions) Amendment Bill 2006
Debate resumed from 17 August 2006, on motion by Mr Corbell:
That this bill be agreed to in principle.
MR STEFANIAK (Ginninderra—Leader of the Opposition) (5.04): The opposition will be supporting this bill. I must say that I wish members of this place had a scheme such as the judges pension scheme, which is probably more generous than the federal parliament scheme. I would actually settle for a CSS scheme for this place.
This bill clears up problems with Supreme Court pensions and restores consistency with those of Federal Court judges, which I understand has been an issue—hardly one that is
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .