Page 3751 - Week 12 - Thursday, 22 November 2007
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Sydney, which now has about 60 per cent in its dams. The government has done very, very little—Mr Gentleman is reading out a series of programs now—until recently to make any attempt to ensure that we actually save water as a result of conservation measures.
I am pleased that they are actually starting to do something with the government office blocks and departments. A number of months ago I raised with the government that we were getting complaints—we still do—about flushing toilets overnight in schools and government buildings where the toilets are old, single-flush toilets. The fact is that in the non-government sector in Canberra, most of the hotels have single-flush toilets. Indeed, in many of our older homes that is still the case. That is not the case in other areas and in other cities in Australia now where I think many more steps have been taken than are occurring here.
Mr Gentleman talks of targets. Initially, he had a target of 13 per cent by 2012. We are achieving that now, and that is good. I commend everyone involved in that. But across the border they are saving 18 per cent through their waterwise program. I think that some of the money spent by this government could be far better spent retrofitting those 30,000 to 40,000 Canberra homes, especially in suburbs built between 1965 and 1985, that still have the single-flush toilet—one of the greatest users of excess water.
I recently put out a media release which contained some startling figures in relation to our daily consumption and Queanbeyan’s. We are both on the same water supply. Queanbeyan does need to get its sewerage system act together, but their waterwise program, which many of ACT plumbers are installing, does seem to have made a significant difference.
It is quite worrying to see figures that show that Queanbeyan, per head of population, is using from 70 per cent down to 50 per cent of what we are using. In fact, Actew figures for 16 November show that we used 143.4 megalitres compared with 8.7 megalitres for Queanbeyan. If you extrapolate our population of 338,000 and theirs of 37,000, if we were using the same amount of water per person or per household as Queanbeyan, we would be using only about 75 megalitres instead of 143.4. That is virtually 50 per cent less.
A lot of that obviously is due to the waterwise program, and there may well be some other things that they are doing which we are not. I think they may have a few more bores to water their ovals, but one of the main reasons obviously has to be that very successful waterwise program. It is certainly something the ACT master plumbers have been on about for some time because it is very much a scheme that they developed.
If we introduced the waterwise program I think that would certainly take us up from the 12 or 13 per cent capacity figure that we now have to about 18 per cent. That would make a very significant difference because, unfortunately, it is not going to rain much in the future. We do have climate change. The water inflows into our dams are so much more restrictive than they were in the past and that is a huge problem for us all. We need to take as many steps as we possibly can to save water.
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