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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 9 Hansard (26 August) . . Page.. 3190 ..

MR STEFANIAK (continuing):

irrigation and a national gold technology award in Australia for irrigation management.

In the early 1990s, they set up Comtrol-the world's most sophisticated urban irrigation system-which currently manages all of our sportsgrounds. As a result of Mr McIntyre's recommendations to me, there was no way in the world I was going to go into any arbitrary 30 per cent reduction in water use, and of course we did not do that.

I will highlight what Mr McIntyre says in relation to a 40 per cent reduction. He states that, on a hot summer's day, to maintain the grass density, there would be a need to apply 5.5 millimetres of irrigation on our ovals. There are currently 260 hectares under maintenance. Five written submissions were received as a result of public consultation on the draft variation, four of which expressed support, while three of those also raised other issues. Issues raised included, among other things, matters concerning precinct boundaries, height, accessibility and parking.

He says that a loss of grass density would lead to the grass dying and clumpy sward developing. If that happens, the risk of user injury increases dramatically, with facial and hand injuries occurring in ball sports like cricket-and ankle and knee injuries occurring as the grass dies and clumpiness develops. Mr McIntyre goes on to state that other councils have been sued successfully for allowing this to happen, which resulted in user injury. So that in itself is a real problem. Therefore, I hope the minister is going to rule out any artificial reduction of 30 or 40 per cent of the watering of all of our ovals.

However, there would be significant problems if the government decided to effectively not water category 3 ovals at all-those comprise another 60 hectares. Those ovals deal with Little Athletics, cricket, baseball, junior and senior cricket-in summer-and hockey, OzTag, league, union, AFL, soccer and touch in winter. Those ovals are at Majura, Charnwood, Holt, Melba, Stirling, Banks, Bonython, Chapman, Conder, Cook, Downer, Duffy, Hackett, Hughes, Kaleen North, Latham, Nicholls, Page, Palmerston, Rivett, Scullin, Torrens and the Forestry Oval at Yarralumla.

Some of those are very significant ovals, because a lot of sport is played on them. For example, at Rivett Oval, which is the home ground of the Royals, there is junior and senior cricket, plus junior and senior rugby. It is interesting that Cook is on the list, because I can recall getting that back for maintenance for Little Athletics. That would be a significant reduction.

I trust Mr McIntyre's figures. I think this could be a conservative figure, but he states that it costs $15,000 per hectare to fix up an oval once it has been stuffed up. That makes it an extremely expensive exercise. He indicates that we currently use, on our 260 hectares, 14.3 megalitres per day. He points out that Googong can supply only 180 megalitres of water and that 90 to 100 megalitres is used inside our houses.

If we cut water to all of our ovals, that would be only 15 per cent of what we use domestically. I hope the minister is not suggesting anything like that. Mr McIntyre goes on to state that it would not take terribly much-and other places have done it-to save a little more water in our houses.

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