Page 2876 - Week 09 - Thursday, 18 August 2005

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between the government and the regulators, the people who are concerned with water conservation and the people who want to use water.

I am entirely in favour of cultural change about the way we manage our gardens. I believe, as I said to Mr Mulcahy when we were discussing this the other day, that you can have your cake and eat it. You can maintain the garden city. You can maintain the look of the city. You can maintain the streetscape and you can conserve water. But you have to be smart about it, and you have to communicate that smartness, that cleverness, to the people who are using it. Yes, people will continue to use water in the way that they always have unless you communicate with them. There is nothing in this moratorium legislation that allows people to communicate that.

This government has failed in almost everything that it has done in relation to conserving water out of doors. It is quite happy to impose and allow Actew to impose water restrictions, but it has done very little to help the horticultural industry, to help gardeners make life better in Canberra so that we can preserve our garden city and still comply with a better, more efficient way of watering. The agricultural industry has done it so that we do not lose water through irrigation, so it goes back into the ground water system. There are ways and means of ensuring that you water things so that you only put on enough water to allow for plant growth and transpiration.

There is nothing that this government has done to help people maintain the amenity that we have come to expect in Canberra and, at the same time, conserve water. There is only the large, monolithic, corporatist moratorium approach. The moratorium is a bad way to do it. The Liberal opposition will be opposing it for all the reasons that I have stated and Mr Mulcahy has stated. We will be opposing this amendment and we will be opposing this clause later in the day.

DR FOSKEY (Molonglo) (11.29): I think what we are looking at here is a conflict of values or something of that kind. The hardship that may be suffered by the people who have been using ground water to keep their gardens green is, I think, being exaggerated by Mrs Dunne at this point. I am not familiar with bore water gardens in Yarralumla, but I walk around Deakin and, of course, I appreciate the greenness in a drought, as we all do, but I also can see that sometimes when people have a lot of water on tap they tend to create gardens that are addicted to water. I hope that one of the things people have learned during Actew’s education campaign is that you can train your garden to exist on less water. There are ways of watering that allow you to minimise your water use and maintain greenness.

I do not think it is the place of this legislation to have in it some way to help ground water gardeners to change their way of gardening. I hope that the people who will be affected by this amendment—and I am not sure of this so I will ask Mr Stanhope to respond to this in his closing speech—will be contacted in a way that lets them know that they may be giving up some private rights to water, as they may believe them to be, and I think that all that needs a change. They should be given hints and ideas on where they to go to find out ways of maintaining their garden over the period. Also, it is quite possible that, at the end of this moratorium, they will not regain their water rights as they see them and as they have had them. We are looking at change here and change is always hard for some people. I believe the government should be making it as easy as possible for this change to be initiated.


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