Page 4786 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 20 October 2010
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as a drought, you can respond or you can do nothing. For the first few years this government chose to do nothing. That is part of the reason we are in the situation we are in now. If the government had acted early we would have a dam by now. It would probably be full by now. I imagine with the recent rains that it would be.
Mrs Dunne: If we’d started building it in 2004 when Mr Smyth and I said we should, it would be full.
MR SESELJA: Indeed. If they had responded to the calls of the Liberal Party, we would be in a very different situation. We would not have been waiting years before we had the extra storage that we need to survive the next drought. Water restrictions would have been behind us long ago. But they did not do so.
The Chief Minister sat in this place and said just a few years ago—I think it was in 2006, so well into this drought—“We may never have to build another dam.” That was the thinking of the government. Their first response was to do nothing. It was to avoid taking action. It was to hope beyond hope that it would just start raining again, and they got caught out. It needs to be put on the record that Canberra families have suffered far more than they should have as a result of this drought because of the inaction of the government and the slow action of the government. It was only several years after the severity of this drought that they actually started to take action on this issue.
I welcome Mrs Dunne’s motion. Mrs Dunne has led the way on this issue and we see the government responding time and time again. We have spoken about the calls for a dam in 2004, but Mrs Dunne has long been advocating that the government get on with it. We saw Mrs Dunne calling for the easing of restrictions again last week. We saw the very hurried response, it seems, of the government to the listing of this motion on the notice paper. Suddenly water restrictions were lifted once it became known that there would be a motion calling for that to happen.
However that came about, we are pleased that the people of Canberra can now start to have reasonable use of water in their backyards. We are very pleased that the families of the ACT and many of the elderly in our community who so enjoy their gardens, who have put so many years of effort and so much of their own money and time into their gardens, can again have reasonable use of those gardens. They can again have the water that they need to maintain a beautiful garden, which is so important to many people.
I would like to talk about that a little bit. Many of us have young families. For those with young families it is a reasonable expectation to have your own patch of grass in the backyard. I do not think that is something that we should be denying families in Canberra. We should always have policies that seek to allow families to have that patch of grass for their kids to run around on. It is one of the wonderful things about Australian life. You can compare us to many other countries. When you travel around the world, to parts of Asia or Europe in particular, for many the norm is living in an apartment, even with young kids. The norm is having a very small abode with very little private open space.
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