Page 1629 - Week 06 - Thursday, 7 June 2007
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members on this side of the house advocated the right of lessees, it was quite clear at that stage that there was no clear quantification of the waters that might be available. So whilst we have indicated we are supporting the bill, I think it would be very useful to know where we are up to in terms of that particular research and whether an outcome was ever determined. As Dr Foskey said, it leaves a significant gap in our knowledge while that information is not forthcoming.
MRS DUNNE (Ginninderra) (7.55): Mr Speaker, the Water Resources Bill is probably, especially in the current climate, one of the most important things that we could debate in this house. Dr Foskey and Mr Mulcahy have touched upon some of the problems. Some good work has been done in this bill, and Mr Stefaniak has touched on that. The improved mapping and classification of the catchments were probably well worth doing and people should be congratulated on that. It does seem to make a great deal of sense.
But there are a number of matters about this bill that I am concerned about, and I think that there has been little or no public discussion. It is a bare month since this piece of legislation was introduced and there has been little or no public discussion upon it. Something that we see a lot when we talk about water resources in the ACT is that people say, “We will not think about it until we have got ourselves into a mess,” and then we will do possibly a whole lot of rash things and end up having to spend a large amount of money on it.
We see this with the Stanhope government, which, from 2004, has spent an inordinate sum of money on trying to do anything it possibly could to avoid building a dam, specifically to avoid building the Tennent dam. It was put to me fairly early in 2004 that the problem with the policy that the Liberal Party took to the last election was not that there was a flaw in the policy—it is a fine policy—but that we had proposed it and, because we had proposed it, it would be impossible for the Labor Party to take it up because, irrespective of the value and the sense of the policy, they could never be seen to be playing catch-up with the Liberal Party over something as important as water resources.
So we have seen over the past three years the Stanhope government bend over backwards and come up with any possible scheme it could as a stopgap measure to avoid the inevitable, and that inevitable is that one day we will have to build the Tennent dam. Yes, we are in a drought at the moment and, yes, the inflows into that catchment are down, but even the most pessimistic climate scientist does not expect that to continue for ever. One of the things that we do know about climate change is that we may get less rainfall—we will almost certainly get less rainfall if climate change occurs in the way that the models currently indicate—but we will get very large rain events. If you get very large rain events, that is when you have to collect the rainwater and the only possible way of doing that is by having adequate storage and having that storage so that you can store it up for the dry times.
We have to take advantage of every possible resource. The work that has been done by Actew to look at a range of other measures, and the pumping of water from one catchment to another which the previous water resources bill allowed for is somewhat ingenious, but I think we are now in the situation where we have pumped so much water out of the Bendora dam into the Googong dam that we have problems with the
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