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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 7 Hansard (5 June) . . Page.. 1962 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

Under the Water Resources Act, the government is required to develop a water resources management plan and environmental flow guidelines, but these documents are more about determining what amount of water can be consumed while maintaining environmental flows, rather than how we can preserve the water supply in the ACT.

Secondly, I want the government to investigation options for returning the ACT's water supply and sewerage services to Actew so that these services can be managed totally for the public benefit and not pressured by a commercial environment which obviously ActewAGL has to work in. Actew did develop its own future water supply strategy some years ago, but with the corporatisation of Actew and then its change to ActewAGL the Assembly is about three steps removed from involvement in this work. The government itself seems confused about its role relative to ActewAGL, even though when in opposition it fiercely opposed Actew's privatisation and then half privatisation.

A major point that came up in the debate over privatisation of Actew in the last Assembly was that water and sewerage services are fundamentally different to electricity supply. Actew's electricity business was working within a national electricity market whereas it had a natural monopoly with water and sewerage. Electricity can be substituted with other energy sources and provided from other sources in many cases, but water has no substitute-it is an essential resource that has natural limits.

Mr Quinlan said yesterday in question time that it would be difficult to unscramble ActewAGL, but this does not apply to the water side of the business. While the electricity side of Actew was totally merged with AGL, the water and sewerage infrastructure was kept under the ownership of Actew and only its management contracted out to ActewAGL.

A review mechanism was also built into the water management contract to take into account the fact that AGL had never run a water business before. The first phase of the contract was meant to be more of an "alliance" between Actew and AGL to work out the costs and risks involved in managing the water and sewerage business. The second phase of the contract was to be negotiated by 30 September 2004 and this would set up an ongoing "arms-length" commercial contract between Actew and ActewAGL.

The government thus has a window of opportunity before the second phase contract is finalised to review whether the half privatisation of our water and sewerage services is really in the public interest. The Greens have always thought that water supply and sewerage should be under public control so that our limited water resources are managed totally in the public interest. Rather than treating water as a commodity to be sold to whoever wants to buy it, and treating waste water as something we need to get rid of as fast as possible, we need to think about the best ways of conserving this resource for the sake of the environment and future generations.

Let me remind members that Actew has a statutory requirement in the Territory Owned Corporations Act to follow the principles of ecologically sustainable development, but I am very concerned that this commitment seems to have been lost in Actew's transformation into ActewAGL. Based on its statements in the previous Assembly, I thought it was the ALP view that water services should be kept under public control. So

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