Page 3858 - Week 15 - Tuesday, 15 December 1992
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We have put $6.5m up - the ACTEW board has approved the expenditure of that sum - to build a dam to ensure that there will not be a bypass. That is the only physical way of ensuring that material does not go into the creek. We are currently conducting an environmental impact study on how that dam could operate. I am aware of claims that the gully that we picked is the habitat of the legless lizard. I have said to the conservation movement, "Life is never easy and life sometimes involves choices". There is an issue of whether we want effluent in the creek or a dam in the gully. It is the only gully where a dam can be built, because it needs to be adjacent to the treatment place. It is not possible, Madam Speaker, to have no dams and no effluent. Either you have no dam and effluent or you have a dam and no effluent.
I look forward to the process of the environmental impact study which is going on with appropriate scientific detecting devices, and I look forward to the cooperation of the conservation movement. As I have said to them, we are not just making woolly statements about the environment here. We are putting up $6.5m of ratepayers' money to ensure that the outflow of water from the ACT is up to the highest standards of quality. The ACT community is putting up that money, because it is coming out of the $25 per household environmental works levy.
I am confident that we can have an outcome that preserves the water quality in the creek - indeed, enhances the water quality - and does not adversely affect the wildlife population. It should be noted that the dam will not be permanently full. It will be filled occasionally in times of flood, and I am sure that that will not lead to the eradication of the legless lizard. But it is not possible to have a solution which has both no dams and no effluent.
Public Hospitals - Interstate Patients
MR CORNWELL: Madam Speaker, my question is directed to the Minister for Health. I was very interested to hear Mr Berry, in one of his longer answers earlier today, say that we must engage in harder negotiations with the Commonwealth. Minister, you would be aware that 25 per cent of patients in ACT public hospitals are from New South Wales and that the new Medicare agreement includes direct payment for interstate transfer patients. I ask, therefore, whether ACT Health will be paid at a rate which will fully recognise costs incurred or whether payment will be made on the basis of average costs in other States.
MR BERRY: Madam Speaker, I am pleased to have the opportunity to answer that question. I question the 25 per cent; I think the figure is a few percentage points lower than that. It depends on what New South Wales does with its hospital system. The Liberals in New South Wales, it appears, are going to close the Bega Hospital.
Mr Humphries: He does not know the answer, in other words.
MR BERRY: No; hang on a minute. That may well affect - - -
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