Page 3616 - Week 08 - Thursday, 19 August 2010
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in the ACT under a single management regime and to enable better implementation of the ACT’s commitments under the national water initiative. Through a relatively recent political realignment, otherwise known as self-government, we have ended up with water resources in the ACT being managed by two separate jurisdictions: the commonwealth maintaining control over water on national lands and the Googong Dam area, while the ACT government has management of all other water in the territory.
In 2007 the ACT implemented the Water Resources Act, which requires management of the ACT’s water resources for the physical, economic and social wellbeing of all Canberrans, establishes the regime for water management to protect aquatic ecosystems and aquifers and ensures that water resources are able to meet the foreseeable needs of future generations. The Water Resources Act is the framework to set environmental flows but it also licenses extraction, waterways work and bore drilling.
It really makes very little sense for some of the ACT’s waterways to be kept separate from that regime and to have water extraction occurring under a different jurisdiction but in what is the same catchment. It particularly makes no sense when we are talking about extraction, where potentially too much water could be taken from the system.
Two main areas are to be handed over to the ACT under this bill: the national lands—that is, Lake Burley Griffin; and the Googong Dam, which forms part of the Canberra water supply. The transfer of management only relates to those areas outlined under the Water Resources Act and not to the management of either activities on Lake Burley Griffin or the issue of water quality of Lake Burley Griffin. These responsibilities will continue to rest with the National Capital Authority.
With the transfer comes a small increase in ACT revenue, which Mr Seselja just referred to, from an initial cost for the water entitlement licences and then a lesser annual amount for the water access charge. It is a little bizarre really that no-one, including the ACT government, has any knowledge of what the previous arrangements were with licensing and extraction amounts as facilitated by the NCA, to the extent that they were unable to even say what fees had previously been charged for the water.
The NCA did introduce a licensing and charging scheme for the abstraction of water for irrigation on 1 July 2001, in accordance with the reforms to water management in Australia under the 1994 COAG agreement, but it became clear during the estimates hearings that the ACT government seemed only to be able to estimate the amount of the water that was being extracted. So it can only be a good thing to bring the management of this resource into the regime that manages all other water in the catchment. It is expected that the users will include commonwealth agencies, Canberra Airport and possibly Canberra Golf Club.
The lack of coordination across the jurisdictions has also played out in regard to Lake Burley Griffin and the quality of the water. Obviously it is the NCA that is currently responsible for monitoring water quality and making decisions about lake closures, and the water quality is regularly checked in line with ACT Health guidelines. But the
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