Page 3755 - Week 12 - Thursday, 22 November 2007
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on because it is one of those things where we can be led by the science and the experience, and I think that that would all bring us to the one conclusion. It is absolutely essential that we need to secure our water supply, but it does raise a lot of other issues.
Mr Seselja: Are you for or against dams, Deb?
DR FOSKEY: We now know that the current climatic conditions—
Mr Seselja: Don’t know?
DR FOSKEY: This is a matter of public importance, not a motion. The fourth IPCC report highlights the predicted weather changes that we can expect over the next century. Most pertinent to this debate, the report predicts that it will consistently rain less than we have come to expect as our annual average. We can no longer talk about a normal year because we do not know what that is.
I am looking forward to the report of the planning and environment committee. It is conducting an inquiry into alternatives to the recycling scheme. I put those terms of reference to the Assembly at a time when that was very, very high on the government’s agenda. I think that we can be a little reassured that we are going to be brought to that issue gradually. I believe that the population in Canberra has not gone along with the recycling to the extent that the government has.
I want to thank the Commissioner for the Environment, who was formerly in charge of the Water2WATER process or the water security group, or whatever it was called, who suggested that Professor Ian Falconer come and talk to me. He was able to explain the issue and answer my concerns about water recycling in terms of health, energy use and whether or not the scheme that we were looking at was the most appropriate and the best one in a way that many of the other people I had spoken to had not been able to.
Because he is a person who comes at these issues from a health perspective, it allayed, to some extent, the concerns that I think that Professor Collignon put into the community—correctly, no doubt—but it also does indicate that if we are going to recycle our water we will need to consider what we put into our waste water. To some extent that concerns what we put into our bodies because it all comes through and we do not necessarily have the technologies to deal with the hormones, pathogens and so on. One little mistake—unlikely, but possible, but not really allowable—can be catastrophic. So there are a lot of implications that require us, as humans, to take some action.
We take unlimited water for granted here in the ACT. I do not think any of us consider that we should not have our daily showers. I suppose most of us do. We sluice our shampoos and our conditioners down the drain without giving a thought to what happens to them afterwards. Water being what it is, a closed loop system, all those things have to be dealt with. Whether we recycle or not, we rely upon the ground to purify the water so that, by the time it gets into the river and by the time it goes through the Molonglo scheme, it is safe enough to put on our ovals and elsewhere.
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