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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 10 Hansard (Wednesday, 25 August 2004) . . Page.. 4250 ..

place of those clauses. The proposed government amendments make redundant all the amendments that I understand Mrs Dunne is proposing to move today.

Looking more closely at the bill, clause 2 deals with commencement. If the bill is passed today, its technical provisions will take effect from 1 September 2004, which will provide a few days for the plumbing industry to be informed of the bill’s requirements relating to showers and garbage disposal units. I will discuss later, in the detail stage, how some of the government’s proposed amendments allow dispensations on certain taps until 1 July next year to allow affected parties to prepare for the provisions on tap efficiency.

The government does not agree with clause 4 of the bill, which inserts proposed section 17A into the Water and Sewerage Act to create an offence against a person for certain breaches of the water and sewerage regulations. The proposed section 17A has a flaw that makes part of it meaningless and unenforceable. Its title refers to water supply plumbing work only, and so does its preamble. In essence, the offence can only operate in respect of water supply plumbing work; it does not apply to any other kind of work. One of the bill’s intentions is to prohibit the installation of under-sink garbage disposal units, but it incorrectly refers to that installation work as being a prohibited form of water supply plumbing work.

From 1 September this year the Water and Sewerage Act 2000 will contain a new definition of “water supply plumbing work”, which will not encompass work to install garbage disposal units. Therefore, as the bill is drafted, it intends to prohibit the installation of such units. This will not be able to be enforced, as it is impossible for a person to do water supply plumbing work by virtue of merely installing a garbage disposal unit to a sink. The person would, in fact, be doing sanitary plumbing work, as defined in the Water and Sewerage Act. Accordingly, the government will move amendments to seek to address this problem.

The government is also unable to support a latter part of the bill, clause 6, both as presented and as amended in ways, which I understand Mrs Dunne has indicated she intends to do. These new regulations the bill proposes to make are fundamentally flawed. While the intention to reduce tap flows to conserve water is sound, a proposal to require most indoor domestic taps to be fitted with a secondary flow reducer is not a viable way to go about conserving water in all cases.

I understand that Australia’s tap manufacturing and importing industries currently have a range of taps available that meet 3A water efficiency flow ratings without needing to separately add secondary flow reducers. For that reason, no secondary flow reducers are available to suit many of those taps. The bill as presented would punish those manufacturers and suppliers by effectively banning the use of those water-efficient taps where no compatible secondary flow reducer is available.

Mrs Dunne intended this bill to act as an interim measure, to begin a quick fix water conservation initiative while national or local reforms progress towards reducing tap flow rates. The fact is, however, that the approach the bill adopts is somewhat indiscriminate. Mandating secondary flow reduction on many kinds of taps will often be counterproductive and will, in some cases, force consumers to install taps with greater flows than the 3A-rated taps that are becoming available.

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