Page 3166 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 17 October 2006
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scarcity. It is not a renewable resource. We do not know enough about the movement of water in our aquifers and we cannot be assured that it will always be there.
I read in our own Canberra Times a letter from someone who had just travelled to Bourke and observed the greenness of the lawns in that town. I have heard about that in Western Australia as well. In the middle of deserts we have towns with green lawns—we would probably never tolerate them here—all at the cost of groundwater. While it may be under one’s own block of land, it actually is a community resource.
One of the issues that the Greens have raised a number of times is the need for an upper Murrumbidgee catchment authority. We sit here in our little territory in the middle of the Murray-Darling Basin and in the middle of New South Wales. We need to be working much more with the other municipalities around us. Having travelled down the Murrumbidgee to where it joins the Murray, I believe that we look after the water that flows through our territory better than the surrounding territories. I think the water benefits from its sojourn within our borders.
Although it may not be directly obvious, many issues in the ACT relate to water. One such issue is the expansion of the zoo. I believe the decision to allow that to go ahead was based on environmental studies, but we were not shown those environmental studies and I do not know what they say. They might have said it was a bad idea. At the moment we are just told that they were favourable. I always get suspicious when I am not allowed to see documents.
We also supply water to Queanbeyan under an historical arrangement, which may or may not have been wise. It certainly has led to some tensions and will lead to more tension as water scarcity deepens. But I do note that Queanbeyan’s program of water efficiency has been much more extensive than ours. Dual flush toilets were not subsidised; they were given away. There were quite a lot of other measures as well. It is interesting that, as buyers of our water, they have decided to take those measures and, as sellers of the water, this jurisdiction is still, I believe, dragging the chain on those issues.
I just wonder at what point we will recognise that we are in a situation where drastic action needs to be taken. I believe that we live in a kind of fool’s paradise where we believe it might rain again next week—maybe we do not believe that any more—or next year, at least, and people like Paul Perkins suggest rationing in the middle of a 30-year cycle of drought. We know that climate change is changing everything in ways that we do not know, and the precautionary principle applies to water as much as anything else. There are things that we can do and I believe that they would put us at the cutting edge.
I think that there is a good opportunity to develop a cutting edge sustainable industry sector based on water efficiency. I have met quite a number of people out there in the community with small businesses based on various aspects of increasing water efficiency around households and other buildings. We could create a market here with regulations. We could also put conditions on the supply of water to neighbouring towns. Why not use the profits from water sales to assist in the establishment of an industry to pay for dual flush toilets and to help people with grey-water cycling?
Water tanks are just, as we know—excuse the pun—a drop in the ocean. Canberra is an inland city, and those tanks do not mean as much as if we were stopping water flowing to
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