Page 3445 - Week 11 - Thursday, 15 November 2007
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place a moratorium on new allocations of surface or groundwater until we know what flows are ecologically sustainable, and these need scientific determination.
We need to cap the amount of water that can be traded out of a district. We need to recognise that irrigation will have to cease in some areas, and develop structural adjustment packages for the transition. We need to permanently protect the red gum icon forests of the Murray valley, and we need to stop water profiteering. We need to assist and enable basin-wide governance. Water trading should be managed by a separate agency, and we need regular “state of the basin” reports tabled in every parliament. We need to develop—(Time expired.)
MR STEFANIAK (Ginninderra—Leader of the Opposition) (12.18): The opposition supports the bill. It is a necessary part of the formal process for the ACT to be admitted as a full voting member of the Murray-Darling Basin initiative, which is formalised through the Murray-Darling Basin agreement.
The initiative was established by the commonwealth government in 1987, with the commonwealth, New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia signing up to the agreement. That agreement was actually an amendment to an earlier agreement, the River Murray waters agreement, and I will come to that shortly. In 1992, a totally new agreement was settled by the parties. That agreement was amended in 1996, when Queensland was admitted as a member. At the end of 1997, steps were taken to get the ACT involved. Since 1998, when that came into force, we have been involved through a memorandum of understanding. It was my great pleasure, as acting environment minister, to travel with Mrs Dunne in November 1997 to Horsham in Victoria, where we signed up. I think Mr Humphries, who was the environment minister, was doing something equally environmentally responsible at the time, as he was in Nagoya in Japan, signing up to a local government commitment to reduce greenhouse gases. It was great to be involved in the historic agreement that got us involved through the memorandum of understanding.
That involvement, whilst valuable to the territory, was nevertheless somewhat tentative because the ACT did not have any voting rights. It could be represented at meetings and participate in discussions but it could not be part of the decision-making process. Once all the formal processes are complete—and the passage of this bill is only a part of that process—the ACT will be able to come to the table as a full voting member of the initiative.
Issues around the River Murray go back a long way. Indeed, they go back to 1863, when the first discussions took place about how best to manage that river as a vital resource for three colonies—New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia. But for the next 50 years or so, colonial parochialism prevented any kind of sensible agreement being reached about management of the River Murray. Finally, in 1915, the River Murray waters agreement was signed by these three colonies which, by then, had become states in the commonwealth of Australia. It was signed also with the commonwealth. Two years later, the River Murray Commission was established to put that agreement into effect.
That agreement was ahead of its time. But whilst overseeing the construction of locks and water storage dams and weirs, it had a chequered history until 1985, when
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