Page 5519 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 17 November 2010

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… by the ACT Government.

It goes on to say a couple of paragraphs down:

The WAC is a statutory charge applied to those licensed to extract water. ACTEW is the only holder of an urban water licence and pays the ACT Government this charge, passing it on to the consumers. The WAC is intended to represent the sustainable price for water. It has five components:

It goes on to list them. Engineers Australia point out in a table on page 53 that over the period 2004-05 to 2008-09 the WAC increased from 25c a kilolitre to 55c a kilolitre. Then there is a discussion about how the change in the levying of the WAC in 2010-11 will in fact effectively increase the WAC to 63c a kilolitre because it is measured differently.

But the most important thing is on the page that I tabled, page 54. That clearly shows that Actew in the ACT has the most expensive water, on the basis of the annual consumption of a household of 250 litres. In fact, I was mistaken. I thought that Perth’s was the most expensive after that but according to this table that is not the case. I do apologise for giving the Assembly wrong information in that regard. But it is quite clear that, at in excess of $630 a year for 250 kilolitres consumption, the ACT has the most expensive water in the country.

The cost of water is reinforced by information that the ICRC provided to the opposition when we were looking for information on water cost. I seek leave to table a graph which comes from a dataset provided to me by Actew. It is called “ACTEW water bill per household: ICRC Analysis based on 250 KL per year”, which is the standard amount.

Leave granted.

MRS DUNNE: I present the following paper:

ACTEW Water bill per household—(ICRC Analysis—based on 250KL per year)—Graph.

This chart shows steady costs over the period 1997-98 to 2001. That was when the ACT Liberal Party was in power. Over that period, water costs increased by 13.6 per cent or an average of 3.4 per cent a year. After that, when ACT Labor took over, until 2011, the cost of household water increased by 176 per cent, according to Actew, or an average of 17.6 per cent a year. As I said before, the Engineers Australia report shows that the Australian Capital Territory has the most expensive urban potable water compared to all the other capital cities. These are important issues that need to be reinforced. Yes, it is the case that you can always find a statistic to support your argument. Of course, the government has been madly scrumming around today attempting to do that.

I think Ms Hunter’s amendment is really a sorry apology for the Stanhope government. It is also a bit schizophrenic. Ms Hunter spends the first part of the amendment


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