Page 1540 - Week 06 - Thursday, 7 June 2007

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(f) maintaining the health of trees and gardens and the city’s Bush Capital character;

(g) the relative financial, environmental and potential health impacts of water capture and reuse practices; and

(h) any other related matters;

(2) the Committee be composed of:

(a) one Member to be nominated by the Government;

(b) one Member to be nominated by the Opposition; and

to be notified in writing to the Speaker by 4 p.m. today; and

(3) the Committee report by the last sitting day in March 2008.

Water is an essential of life. We cannot do without it, and most of us have never had to. Few of us have been thirsty for more than a few hours. I wonder how many people here have gone for weeks at a time without a full immersion wash. Yet right now we are staring down the barrel of that possibility. I do not mean to the extreme of perpetual thirst. We are not yet in Third World straits. If we ever did reach dire straits with our water supply, we are a rich enough community to be able to extract water from other people’s aquifers and rivers—sustainably or not—and consume it from plastic bottles, which will then become a waste problem.

In my opinion, we are not grappling with the problem. The government is now saying that it expects it to rain this year. The government and the community are not yet prepared to accept that water is a scarce resource and that climate change, in all likelihood, will make it scarcer. Apparently we are not prepared to change the way we live or the way we design our houses, our suburbs and our commercial buildings to reflect the reality of scarce water—a reality that farmers and indigenous people, people whose only water resource is the rain that falls on their land or runs through their land have always faced. Those who can afford them do not want to go without private pools, and their voice appears to be a very loud one in this community. The only question about water that ever seems to get serious attention in this town is how to secure more of it for our use.

Because the expectations of government and those of many in the community merge on this issue, we are currently considering very expensive, very new and very complex technologies so that we can cycle our water around and around—from rivers, through us, to ponds, through membranes, pumped uphill, piped downhill, resting for a while in a 10 times enlarged Cotter Dam and then off again through us and our plants. And the journey goes on. It is not that water is not already recycled. There is no such thing as a new drop of water. Even rainmaking works only if there is already moisture in the clouds to be convinced to fall to earth as droplets. Because water cannot be made, it must be reused to the nth degree, forever.

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