Page 1099 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 28 March 2017
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report addresses recommendations 3 and 4 of the public accounts committee report No 31 Review of the Auditor-General’s report No 3 of 2015: restoration of the lower Cotter catchment.
At this point, Madam Speaker, I would clarify that recommendation 4 of the public accounts committee report pertains to the Commissioner for Sustainability and the Environment and her office’s progress in evaluating the restoration of the lower Cotter catchment. Minister Rattenbury carries the portfolio responsibility for the Commissioner for Sustainability and the Environment. As I will be updating the Assembly on other matters pertaining to the Auditor-General’s report, in the interests of practicality I will also take the opportunity to update the Assembly on the commissioner’s progress to date in regard to this matter.
One of the defining features of the geography of the ACT is, of course, the distinctive mountains to the city’s west. The potential to source drinking water from these mountainous native forests was an important factor influencing the choice for the site of Australia’s new federal capital. In 1915 the Cotter Dam was built just upstream of where the Cotter River meets the Murrumbidgee River. For over 40 years it stood as the source of Canberra’s only drinking water supply. As the city grew, administrators recognised the need for more dams; so the Bendora and Corin dams were built, also on the Cotter River, in the late 1960s.
As the first Europeans, and the earliest people of the Limestone Plains before them, would attest, these mountains to the west were regularly subjected to episodes of bushfire. The Canberra bushfires of 2003 were the most widespread felt in the ACT, possibly since 1939. Almost all of the Namadgi National Park’s 110,000 hectares were affected; there was also complete devastation of the nearby Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve and the thousands of hectares of pine plantations at Ingledene, Miowera, Gibraltar and Pierces Creek.
The relatively rapid recovery of the natural landscape contrasted with ex-pine plantation areas, which would need active management to ensure that the thin soils would not wash away and pollute the downstream catchments. One such area of ex-pine plantation is the lower Cotter catchment. The need to actively intervene to recover this important landscape was the catalyst for an important community-government partnership. Led by Greening Australia and the Parks and Conservation Service, work on the re-greening the Cotter began, with hundreds of Canberrans volunteering to plant over 300,000 native seedlings over an area of 500 hectares of fire-devastated lower Cotter catchment.
Also, post-2003 and in the middle of the millennium drought, attention turned to strategic planting that might deliver security of water supply in a drying climate. An enlarged Cotter Dam was an important element of that strategy. In 2009 work commenced on enlarging the capacity of the existing dam through the construction of a new, higher dam wall structure. In 2013 the enlarged Cotter Dam was completed, activating a further 20,000 hectares of land as new drinking water catchment for Canberra.
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