Page 4791 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 20 October 2010
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opportunities. It does seem to me an obvious thing that all the new houses in Molonglo and places like East Lake should be built with built-in grey water systems.
I have seen various technological models which I think are quite exciting in terms of the opportunities they offer Canberrans to have nice gardens into the future, at the same time not using a potable water supply to achieve that. It is not the time today but there are certainly some really interesting models that are household scale but that can also be built into the town water supply system in terms of being able to manipulate them to flush the system. There are various other models. But there is the potential to set up a grey water authority to maintain those systems and the like. There is a whole lot of work that can be done there. My sense is that we are not being that bold or that visionary at the moment.
We should be considering the prospective challenges in the Murray-Darling Basin and the cuts we have seen suggested for Canberra. These are the measures we need to be putting in place now. With a growing population, to some extent, no matter how good the rainfall, we cannot keep promising people they can have all the water they want.
We do need to continue to develop urban ponds to manage our storm water better so as to deliver water to our playing fields, the community green space and treed streetscapes. These are all things that, as a community, we value and we do need to find the water, particularly to ensure those green spaces are maintained. We have debated Green Square in Kingston of course in this place before. As we live in denser urban landscapes, those community spaces are more important to residents and I think it is justifiable to spend water on those common spaces because many more people are using them than you would get in a single-household backyard.
We need to continue to push household efficiency measures, the really obvious things that people now take for granted. We need to continue to roll out low-flow taps, low-flow toilets, low-flush toilets.
One thing I did want to comment on while we are talking about water is the opportunities that are presented by the current good rainfall season. I think it is a time in which we should be considering building our resilience in our urban landscape for future dry periods and future hot, dry periods. We believe this has potential and we would like see whether the government could explore whether we should be undertaking a large amount of new tree planting now and really accelerating the program because it is a season in which the new plantings can take hold but also, if they take hold, they can provide that resilience in the future so that when the hot, dry periods come back we have got a landscape more capable of dealing with it.
I know the government has a tree planting program. I guess the question is: is this a year when we want to spend some money and some time, because this is a chance to really enable these young specimens to get a foothold?
I think I should wrap up. In conclusion, I simply want to say that the water channels for the ACT, I believe, will remain for the foreseeable future. The scenarios outlined by the CSIRO, which I touched on earlier, of 50 per cent lower inflows into the future are sobering. The ACT government and the community must continue to be vigilant and committed to water efficiency measures. In whatever steps we take to adjust to
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