Page 1847 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 4 May 2011
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I think it would be an impossible task to ask the ICRC to have regard to the Murray-Darling Basin plan and its implications for the territory in the context of secondary water use in this referral. I just do not understand how you have an inquiry that has regard to a plan that has not yet been made, the details of which have not yet been made public. I just do not know how you have an effective inquiry in those circumstances. To me, that is one of the most flawed aspects of this proposed referral. I ask other members, particularly the Greens, to have regard to the fact that if you support this, you are going to be supporting an inquiry which has to have regard to a plan the details of which details have not been made public and which are unknown. That is the referral to the Murray-Darling Basin provisions.
I think that is a real problem. I think it is an insurmountable problem, and I think it highlights again why this referral is premature. It is premature because we do not know what is in the Murray-Darling Basin plan. We will not know until later this year what the draft plan says. It is premature because we have not yet completed and got findings from the review of think water, act water, which is the key water policy document for the territory. It is premature because we have not completed the largest of the secondary water use infrastructure projects in the territory—the Canberra urban water waste projects—nor do we have a pricing decision from the ICRC in relation to what the economic costs of that water will be for end users. In all of these areas, we have unknowns. And yet in those circumstances, you want to go and embark on a whole-scale look at secondary water use without, I would argue, the key inputs needed to actually have a meaningful inquiry.
For those reasons, the government will not be supporting this referral today. Water security and development of alternative water uses is a legitimate policy issue and an important policy issue that the government believes needs and is attending to. But to ask the ICRC to undertake this work at this time fails to acknowledge where we are at in terms of some of the key inputs that the ICRC would have regard to and fails to recognise that it would be premature and very difficult for the ICRC to give us a very meaningful analysis on these issues, given the uncertainties around those issues that I have highlighted. As I said, the government will not be supporting the amendment today, and I urge members to not lend their support to the motion moved by Mr Hanson.
MR RATTENBURY (Molonglo) (5.40): I thank Mrs Dunne and, on her behalf, Mr Hanson for bringing forward this motion today. I think it raises some very important issues. The Greens support the broad intent of what we believe Mrs Dunne is trying to achieve, although, having listened to the speech that was given, I probably have some slightly different perspectives on how we approach some of these issues.
At the heart of the motion is an analysis of water re-use in the ACT. We support an analysis of that because water, of course, is an incredibly valuable natural resource and re-use of it is important for social, economic and environmental reasons. Water re-use reflects the true value of water by seeking to get multiple uses out of it before returning it to the river.
A single-use system of water is wasteful. The cost alone of capturing, treating, storing and piping water to our homes makes it highly inefficient to only put that water to a
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