Page 4766 - Week 13 - Tuesday, 10 November 2009
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focusing on encouraging the reuse and the better use of non-potable water in the city to improve the diversity of the supply.
Mr Hanson: He is talking about the Cotter Dam now.
MR CORBELL: You can speak if you like, Mr Hanson, but I have not heard you in this debate today. The work that is occurring through, for example, the Flemington Road ponds project—the water retention ponds, which will provide a potable reuse supply for places such as the racecourse and the showgrounds—and, indeed, the money that we put into the most recent budget for similar projects in Dickson and Lyneham are going to make a big difference. Overall we believe we can capture over two gigalitres of non-potable water and provide it to irrigate sportsgrounds and playing fields. That is what the community wants. They want to see their sportsgrounds and their playgrounds continue to be irrigated even in times of drought, and that is what these projects will allow us to do.
The record of achievement is a significant one in the Environment, Climate Change, Energy and Water portfolio. In community safety, equally, important work is happening. We have implemented our election commitment to reform the law of murder in the territory and bring it into line with the common law as it exists throughout Australia. We have implemented our election commitment to provide for the monitoring of our closed-circuit TV network in real time across the city. We have expanded it into Manuka and Kingston, effectively giving police more eyes and more tools to deal with crime, particularly in our entertainment nightspots.
We have put in place important reforms around bushfire preparedness. A new strategic bushfire management plan is now in place; a contemporary, modern, science-based plan that will give great guidance for many years to come in how bushfire fuel and bushfire management should be handled in the territory.
We have given greater support to the community through additional community fire units, 12 new units to be delivered over the next two years to provide householders, local people in their local streets adjacent to the urban interface, with the tools they need to protect their homes, to protect their neighbourhoods in the event of a fire affecting them. So these are all important reforms, equally, when it comes to community safety.
The government has more work to do. For example, in liquor law reform, I have outlined the government’s new agenda on tackling alcohol-related crime and violence. The liquor law reforms are now in the processes of being drafted for presentation to the Assembly in due course. These reforms focus on a risk-based approach, focus on the need to make sure that those establishments that cause the greatest problem have the greatest scrutiny and regulation applied to them, to make sure that those problems do not get out of hand. That is, indeed, the approach that we will have through the reforms to the Liquor Act that I announced earlier this year.
Finally, something I am particularly proud of, the Gungahlin police station is now a 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week operation, providing better support in community safety for that community.
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