Page 3752 - Week 12 - Thursday, 22 November 2007
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Mr Gentleman mentioned sports grounds. That is a start, but I am concerned because I have heard that only $300,000 of that funding is actually going to be utilised for the ovals. Since 2003, ever since we have had those restrictions which have affected so many of our sports grounds, the solution has been quite obvious. Even then I was saying that we should plant drought tolerant grasses such as couch on our ovals and parks. I know that Actew has a program—I saw it a year or more ago; I think it was at the Catholic school at Watson—where they have got about eight different types of grasses on an oval. It is a well-known fact, and I have seen government reports which actually indicate that if you use couch grass you are only using 20 to 30 per cent of the water you would use on Kentucky grass.
One of the major sources of water usage in the territory, apart from homes and buildings, is outdoor water usage. The various restrictions on outdoor water usage certainly bring water usage down. It is essential in ensuring that we can survive the drought. We used to have about 300 hectares of ovals. I am not sure how many we are watering now; it is well under 200, and dropping. But if we had those drought tolerant grasses, that would make a huge difference. Water usage could be reduced by 20 or 30 per cent. We could keep most of those ovals, if not all of them, and probably save half as much water as we used to in the good old days when we did not have to worry too much about these things.
Mr Gentleman mentioned the Southwell Park recycling plant which covers Fyshwick and Molonglo. There was one at Banks, too, which I think got hit by lightning a few times. You might like to reactivate that because, quite clearly, it is now a lot more viable to use recycled water on ovals than it was 10 or 15 years ago. You have few improvements there. The use of stormwater runoff is in its infancy. A number of golf clubs very effectively use stormwater runoff. It is not all that difficult. I am starting to see a few projects. I note one which Malcolm Turnbull opened not all that long ago, using about $10 million’s worth of commonwealth money, near the O’Connor shops. I think Senator Humphries announced some money for a program at Giralang which actually helps the local soccer club there. Mary Porter and I made representations to government about that.
Those are the sorts of things you need to be doing, and you need to be doing them a lot more than you have to date. The fact that you are only just starting to do those things is of concern because those are the obvious things to do in terms of saving water. We simply are not doing enough. When we get shown up by struggle town, it is a bit of a worry. Some of the things that we could be doing, and should have been doing for a fair amount of time, simply have not been done because the government has not been serious about conserving water.
I hope they are now. I welcome the debate and I welcome the statements you make, Mr Gentleman. They might be late, but it is always better to have something now, rather than never. But it is very, very late. Let us hope that you are now serious about conserving water because it is crucial and all the signs show that it is going to be a real problem for us into the future. We have climate change. It absolutely terrifies me. Today I walked out thinking, “Fantastic. We might get some rain.” But I doubt very much that that rain has made a drop in the catchment unless there has been more rain there than in town. We get a little bit of rain, and then it suddenly stops.
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