Page 5518 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 17 November 2010
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scheme is fully deployed to that extent, which is probably somewhere between three and six years away. That is the price impact on the average household electricity bill—less than $2 a week in three to six years time, when the current ACT average electricity bill is $700 a year less than the average household electricity bill in New South Wales.
That is the context in which the government is making its policy decisions. It highlights how the government is managing the deployment of its policy settings to ameliorate and manage the cost on households. That shows prudent policy making, sensible policy making and policy making with regard to managing price impacts for Canberra families.
Madam Deputy Speaker, the Liberal Party are very pleased to beat the populist drum on this issue, but when you peel apart their arguments you see they are either dumb or deceitful in the arguments that they make. And the Canberra community will see through that.
MRS DUNNE (Ginninderra) (11.44): I will dwell on a couple of points. I will go first to the point attempted to be made by Mr Corbell. He needs to be careful about whom he calls dumb and deceitful when he uses statistics in this place. I will say that the figures that I have referred to about the cost of water are, as far as I can tell, the most recent. They come from the infrastructure report card 2010 by Engineers Australia, unlike the National Water Commission report that is a 2009 report and refers to the 2007-08 period. I seek leave to table page 54 of the infrastructure report card 2010 by Engineers Australia.
Leave granted.
MRS DUNNE: I present the following paper:
Infrastructure Report Card 2010—Australian Capital Territory, prepared by Engineers Australia—Copy of page 54.
It shows that in fact Actew does have the most expensive water charges, that is, water separated from water and sewerage. We need to make sure that we look at those charges. The annual bill comparison is based on annual water consumption of 250 kilolitres per year for the year 2008-09. The figures that the minister was referring to as 2008-09 figures are in fact 2007-08 figures. I will do a little dip into the commentary from Engineers Australia about the cost of potable water in the ACT:
Water prices in the ACT are made up of three components:
Water tariff charged by ACTEW
Water Abstraction Charge (WAC) levied by the ACT Government—
I will repeat that—
… levied by the ACT Government
Network Facilities Charge (NFT) levied—
by whom?—
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