Page 1633 - Week 06 - Thursday, 7 June 2007
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our ovals will now be laid to waste by the decisions taken by this government. Eighty per cent! We see how integral water is to the community. Let us face it; most of us have let our gardens go. The grass is not looking real green these days unless you have had a good drop of rain recently, which most of us have not. We have had some rain, but it has not done a great deal of good. There is not a lot of green grass in streets and suburbs. Community ovals will become more and more important.
We did some things when we were last in office that I have not spoken about; I kept them until this point. There were schemes like Southwell Park water mining, which Mr Stefaniak had a big part in, and things like the extension of recycling water to Russell and the ADFA-RMC complex. We knew then that we faced problems. We knew then that we had to look for alternative sources. We knew then that we had to stop using potable water for watering lawns and gardens—and in particular for the ovals. We had some solutions in place. The sad shame of it is that for the past six years nothing has been done in regard to ovals. Unfortunately, the sporting community was told today that 80 per cent of the ACT’s ovals will now be allowed to just die. That represents about 200 out of 260-odd hectares of playing fields that we have.
What the government has not done is look at the example of, for instance, the Bracks government. They have put up two separate initiatives—one for metropolitan and one for rural Victoria. There are grants available—I believe the number is up to $30,000 per community group—to cart water. Mr Barr has said in a number of forums—and he has said it to the sporting community—that there is no money to cart water: we will not be carting water; we will not be providing trucks to cart water.
It is incredibly short-sighted. We have the Chief Minister and the Deputy Chief Minister, the Minister for Health, saying how important it is that we stop people from coming into the hospital system. If something breaks the cycle of young people participating in sport, it often stops them coming back. That is a great shame. There will be disruption caused to organised sport. You can look at a number of areas. There is organised sport as a business, organised sport as a passion of many groups and organised sport as the thing that really keeps a lot of our young people on the straight and narrow—keeps them healthy, keeps them out of crime and adds to their fitness, which adds to their personal wellbeing and their ability to study. It is well recognised that kids that are fitter perform better—socially, in an educational sense and in a sporting capacity. I really question the short-sightedness of laying to waste 80 per cent of our playing fields.
If we go to level 5, there will be no exemptions. It will be interesting to see what will happen then with Bruce and with the Manuka Oval. The Vikings facility in Tuggeranong is regarded as one of the top five rugby pitches in the country. Ainslie Aussie rules oval is a similar sort of pitch and is a beautiful oval. I understand that it would not take much money to get Ainslie onto the recycled water grid, but we are not even considering it. That is incredibly short-sighted.
Let me show people the true value of some of these decisions where we cut water off and we do not make adequate water available because we have not made provision in storage or guarded the resources as closely as we could have. Mr Stefaniak said earlier that the decision to ease water restrictions when it looked as though the drought might
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