Page 1630 - Week 06 - Thursday, 7 June 2007

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storage there. It is at an unprecedentedly low capacity, and part of that has been contributed to by the mechanisms that the Stanhope government and Actew have gone in for of moving water from one catchment to another.

One of the things that we do not seem to take into account here is that there is an inextricable link between surface water and groundwater. It is not a perfect link, but we do not seem to be talking about it as one system, and we never have, in this place. It has been a fault with the water resources legislation up until now that there has been very little or no attention paid to groundwater provision.

Whilst I had reservations about the bore moratorium, and there are still issues for the community in that moratorium process, it was a start in that we were starting to get our head around the quantum of the resource, where it flows, how it flows, where it is stored, how long it takes to recharge, et cetera. For instance, if somebody who takes water out of a bore irrigates their property properly, not so that there is too much evaporation and things like that, we do not know how much of that actually recharges back into the aquifer. We do not know that. If you are a proper and judicious user of water, a proportion of the water that you put on your oval, your market garden or whatever, if it is done properly, will actually recharge back into the system, but we do not know how much and we still have not got the research.

I am concerned that we have got some changes in this legislation that are not borne out by research or, if they have been borne out by the research, the research has not been made public. There are some elements of this bill that are good. There are some elements of this bill that are still open to a great deal of debate and scrutiny. I think that this is something that we should be moving cautiously on and taking a great deal of care on and that the government should be coming back to us to report on progress and, if necessary, to amend this legislation because at this stage I am not convinced that this is legislation that does create security for our groundwater resources.

MR SMYTH (Brindabella) (8.02): Water is without doubt a large issue in the minds of all Australians. Back in the early 1990s, Pluto Press, quite an interesting small publishing firm, published a book called Top Guns and Toxic Whales. Even back in the early 1990s, it was theorising that, very likely, in the near future water would become a significant issue—indeed, that modern wars may well be fought over water allocations.

The Ethiopians, I understand, have plans to dam the upper reaches of the Nile, which would somewhat upset people lower down the flow of the Nile, particularly in Egypt. India, Nepal, Bangladesh and some other smaller countries in that area have recently come up with a huge hydro-electric scheme that will affect the Brahmaputra and the other rivers that flow into the Bay of Bengal. Unless we see cooperation, we will see conflict over water. That is the same in Australia. Australia is, in the main, looked to by the rest of the world as a country that does quite a deal of work, and good work, on water.

I have said in this place before that on a visit to South Africa I met Kader Asmal, who was the South African minister for dams. They specifically have a minister for dams to ensure that the country has an adequate water supply. He was quite delighted to


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