Page 282 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 7 March 2007
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Cotter to the Googong. There was a fetish with the construction of the Tennent dam, a dam which would not be full now. At the last election, Mr Smyth promised that the day after the election, after they converted that $100 million of capital for the prison into $100 million of recurrent expenditure for the hospital, they would start building the dam. (Time expired.)
MR MULCAHY: I have a supplementary question, Mr Speaker. Chief Minister, why, with the benefit of the knowledge of a trend of consistently low inflows, did your government not act in 2004 to expand the territory’s water storage capacity? Isn’t it true that if you had done so such a facility would now be well advanced towards completion?
MR STANHOPE: We could have concentrated on the Tennent Dam, as the Liberal Party would have, had it won the last election—an option which I understand from briefings that Mr Mulcahy received from Actew he no longer supports. I understand that Mr Mulcahy’s last conversation with the Chief Executive of Actew, and Actew post a detailed briefing on the situation we currently find, was that the Tennent Dam option is a dumb option—and of course it is.
We could have, as Mr Smyth promised to do on the day after the last election had the Liberal Party won that election, commenced construction. I remember the words now: “We will commence construction the day after the election.” That was the promise 2½ years ago. It would not be completed; it would have no water in it. Even if it were completed, it would have no water in it. It would not have been done; it would still be up to the planning stage. There would be absolutely not a drop of water in it because it has not rained and inflows have been down to less than 10 per cent over the last year.
What we have done is repair the neglect of seven years of government. We have created and expanded on the capacity to treat enough water for each of us to drink. You left us, when you left government, in a situation where we did not have the capacity to treat sufficient water for every man, woman and child in the territory. We now have it; for the first time in our history, we now have it as a result of our initiatives. We now have the capacity to transfer water from the Cotter catchment to the Googong catchment, to a well-performing-in-a-reasonable-year catchment, to an extremely poorly performing catchment.
We have a capacity now to store water, which we previously did not have. Indeed, during that process we have transferred over 10 gigalitres of water which, in the context of the 34.8 per cent total that we now have, is very significant. That 10 gigalitres, which is the result of the innovation and the foresight of Actew and of this government, now resting in Googong, is a fundamentally important extra 10 gigalitres that, had we pursued your policies, your single-minded fetish for a new dam at Tennent, we would not have. It has given us a buffer at this stage, which may prove to be invaluable.
In addition to that, we have sunk a major sump and pumps into the Murrumbidgee River. They are there. We now have a capacity, for the first time, to take water out of the Murrumbidgee River. Because of the major construction of a sump and the planting of significant pumps within the river we now have the capacity to take water
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