Page 750 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 9 March 2005
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
they have had to draw upon and with the management regime we have put in place. More significantly, I have confidence that our catchment restoration will proceed effectively and that our catchments will continue to deliver high-quality water for our city.
To that extent, it is probably appropriate at this stage to move an amendment that I propose to the motion. I have circulated the amendment and I move:
Omit all words after “That this Assembly”, substitute “commends the Government for its Cotter catchment restoration work.”.
In the context of that, it is important that we address some of the issues that have been raised in this debate—if I might call it a debate—that has been driven from the Canberra Times over the last five days. There are issues in relation to what has been written or reported that it is appropriate that we address in this debate. I think what we all look for—and it has been very much of the comments that have been made already by the opposition—is some lead, some guidance, a sharing of scientific views.
There has been much reference to scientists and scientific views within the Canberra Times and it is necessary that we address some of those. For instance, there was a non-attributed reference in the first of the articles on Wednesday, 2 March, with the headlines “Cotter catchment chaos” and “Halt to pine replanting as water supply threatened”. It was not that there was just a halt to pine plantation or replanting; we halted all work to give us time to reflect and a pause in relation to the modus operandi, the work that was being done and how it was being done.
In that particular article, “leading scientists”—unnamed—described the catchment as a “basket case”. We do not know who those leading scientists were—it was in the plural. The phrase “basket case” has been used day after day, continually republished; yet the view, or the phrase, as far as I am aware, has yet to be attributed to a single scientist, let alone to all scientists. For the sake of the debate that we are now pursuing, it would be interesting to know who these leading scientists are that have raised these particular concerns about the lower Cotter catchment being a basket case.
Similarly, in the same article, it says that leading scientists “have also raised concerns about significant levels of arsenic and manganese in the river sediments”. Once again, there is no real identification of which leading scientists have raised concerns about significant levels of arsenic. My office indeed has asked for the names of the scientists that have raised this particular concern, and we are looking for the reports that have actually indicated these significant levels of arsenic and manganese in the river sediments, but we cannot at this stage attract or find those particular reports. We do, of course, have the analysis of ACTEW of arsenic levels within the water. So we are interested in that particular scientist being identified, and we are particularly interested in seeing his reports on issues in relation to arsenic and manganese.
On Thursday, 3 March, we had a headline in the Canberra Times of “How Cotter mess could have been avoided”. The first and second paragraphs of that article are essentially an allegation that the ACT government—in other words, ACTEW in this particular instance—ignored expert CSIRO advice on protecting the water supply. It quotes a Professor John Williams as saying that the “installation of inappropriate filtration technology had needlessly caused a shut-down of the Corin dam,” which is, of course, in
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .