Page 1546 - Week 06 - Thursday, 7 June 2007
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MR SPEAKER: You cannot move them yet. We have to deal with the amendments that are being put forward by Mr Corbell first.
MR STEFANIAK: I foreshadow those amendments and I will speak in relation to them now to save some time. I indicate, too, that we will be opposing the government’s amendments.
This is a crucial issue. Given the amount of work that the planning and environment committee has, this issue is far too important just to be put in a queue of matters that that committee is looking at. Dr Foskey ranged fairly widely in the terms of reference. That is sensible. It is sensible that this Assembly does consider the various issues in relation to water supply, how water is used and what we need to do in the future—including worst-case scenarios. We need to look at what we can do in the short term, the medium term, and the long term.
The government has only recently come up with any ideas at all. It concerns me when I see places in the surrounding region such as Queanbeyan doing better than us in terms of their water usage. In terms of domestic usage, I think they have achieved an 18 per cent reduction. The latest figures I heard in relation to the ACT were that it was only some 13 per cent. Other parts of the region are actually doing it tougher than us. There is a lot that we can learn from how they are doing it in Yass and Goulburn.
In my foreshadowed amendment, I propose to add sporting fields to paragraph 1 (f). It would then read “maintaining the health of trees, sporting fields and gardens and the city’s Bush Capital character”. That is crucially important. One thing that I would hope this committee would consider—the government certainly should be considering it, if it is not already—is how to maximise the use of water on our ovals: the use of potable water and, indeed, non-potable water. Non-potable water is ideal if you can actually do it. There are at least some ovals being watered in that way at present.
In Goulburn, with a mix of couch and kikuyu grass, they have a series of playing fields which use about 20 per cent of the amount of water used by the normal grasses in our region. That is a sensible thing to do. The playing fields look a bit brown in winter, but after a bit of rain they spruce up very nicely. They provide an excellent playing surface for contact sports. Currently, I think they are only playing touch on it while it grows, but, if you compare it with the patchy grass of an oval that has not been watered next door, you can see the difference. These are the things we need to look at.
I also propose to add to Dr Foskey’s motion “the provision of adequate water storage facilities to drought-proof the ACT”. Again, finally, the government has come up with a proposal that does include effectively a new dam. Its proposal is to utilise the site of the existing Cotter, build a dam wall downstream and extend the capacity of that dam from about four gigalitres to, I think, 78.
It is crucially important that we look not only at the medium term—it is going to take at least five years or so to build any dam here—but also at the long term. What water storage facilities do we need to drought-proof the ACT? What other ideas do we need? There is a plethora of possibilities which we have to look at.
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