Mr CADMAN (4:10 PM) —I want to deal with another resource issue and that is water. The capital cities of Australia are facing high and dry times. It seems to me that it does not matter whether it is Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne, Adelaide or Perth, the average water supply available to those cities is at 40 per cent of capacity. Some are below that level; some are slightly above it—on average, they have 40 per cent of their water supply left. The city of Sydney, I understand, has roughly, at current usage rates, two years water supply left. There have been numerous inquiries into the water needs of Sydney and Australia. There was The value of water: inquiry into Australia’s urban water management report from the Senate inquiry in 2002, the Wentworth Group in 2004 and Pratt Water in 2005, just to name three really significant in-depth studies of water needs and pricing structures for water.

Desalination appears to be the answer for New South Wales, according to the Premier as well as the water KGB. Mr Deputy Speaker Jenkins, I know you have not seen them in Melbourne—they drive yellow vehicles and they lurk round the suburbs hoping to catch an unsuspecting suburbanite spraying their lawns at the wrong time or washing their car at an hour of the day or in a manner not approved by the Carr government. Those are the two policies. I know the Premier has dismissed the generation of electricity by wind in order to drive a desalination plant because it is a kookaburra-killing exercise. I did not realise, until he made this enlightened statement, that wind power kills kookaburras. Therefore, it is off the agenda for the state of New South Wales and we will be depending on nuclear power linked with a desalination plant. It is just a small budgetary item of $2 billion or $3 billion. That is $2 billion or $3 billion to solve the water problems of Sydney. There will probably be a six- or 10-year delay before we actually get it, but Sydney has water sufficient for two years. I am concerned that the water KGB and the desalination plant are not really going to solve some of the problems for Sydney or for some of the other capital cities around Australia.

Dams have never been lower than they are at the moment and we have, just up the road from Canberra, the tragic circumstances of the city of Goulburn facing the prospect of drinking water only and one shower a week. That is the rationing Goulburn is currently facing. A Sydney Morning Herald article said:

That would be something too terrible to contemplate. The article goes on to say:

Charles Essery, a former executive of Sydney Water, said that there is no real plan to solve these problems in any of the cities of Australia.

Only three years ago, Warragamba Dam, Sydney’s major supply, was 86 per cent full. The article went on:

in New South Wales—

That is exactly what is happening now. It appears to be a policy in New South Wales, a whole-of-government approach that seems to be: ‘Fingers crossed, let’s hope it rains.’ The people of Goulburn do not think that is good policy, I do not think it is a good policy and people in the burgeoning, expanding suburbs of Sydney do not think it is a good policy either.

If we look at the budget and the way in which water resources have been looked at in the Sydney region we will see that in 1960 Warragamba Dam was completed for a population of one million people. In 1998, seven years ago, the dam was at capacity. Now the population is five million people and the storage is 37 per cent full. The major Sydney supply was full six or seven years ago and it is now serving a population of five million people instead of one million people. The state government in 2005-06 is spending $406 million on state-wide water infrastructure. This includes $86 million to access deep water stores in Warragamba, Nepean and Avon dams and the introduction of a fund of $30 million to encourage water saving projects by business.

By the way, you would be shocked to know that the Country Towns Water Supply and Sewerage Program of $85 million, which was promised this year, has a budget allocation of only $32 million. So the budget for country town water supplies has been cut by two-thirds. That alone is a cause of great concern, I would imagine, for my country colleagues. There has been no modelling or preparation. Nothing has been done.

What do the experts say should be done to resolve this issue? There are a number of principles or philosophies that could easily be applied to maximise the existing investment by making sure that the reticulation systems are properly used and properly maintained. There is a redundancy in the current system that can be easily taken up. There must be management of demand—and the state government has done that, but not sufficiently well—by educating consumers and landowners about how they can make better use of valuable water.

A charging regime should also be used. I noticed today that there has been talk by Frank Sartor, the New South Wales minister, that he is going to have a dual pricing system: one for residents of homes and another one for industry. The people in homes have copped it so far. They have had to put up with the rationing program, and it seems to me they are going to cop another price rise and a regime for industry that will just be a flat rate. There are no programs by which industries can improve their efficiency.

The diversity of supply needs to be looked at. I believe we have to look at how we can recycle all the stormwater that is running out to sea. It is much cheaper to recycle stormwater than to build a desalination plant. A desalination plant has to turn salt water into fresh water whereas stormwater is only slightly polluted and can easily be upgraded for use in gardens, toilets and other uses around the suburbs.

The maximum use of local water harvesting schemes is something that the Commonwealth is going to encourage through its program under the National Water Commission, recently established by the Deputy Prime Minister. There needs to be maximisation of rainwater harvesting—that is, collecting local rainfall by making sure that there is compulsory collection onsite by tanks and detaining basins or investment in retention, whether it be in the form of underground tanks or larger dam-like structures. And there must be truly cost-effective pricing.

Those are some of the principles. I know that Dr Charles Essery has made presentations here in Parliament House and I have been delighted to see that there is some imagination. Unfortunately he has left the water board. I know that within CSIRO and the Water Commission there are solutions, but there are no solutions in the New South Wales government, apparently. The New South Wales government seems incapable of facing these issues. My colleague Pat Farmer, the member for Macarthur, finds that he is going to have another 100,000 homes built in his area. In the electorate of Mitchell there will be another 60,000 homes.

There have been no plans for water supply, no vision, and no dedication of any type to the way in which those water needs are going to be met. And yet we have experts, up hill and down dale, saying that Sydney is facing a water crisis which needs to be dealt with. Frank Sartor, in his reign, has been a disaster and Bob Carr, in posing around the country side claiming to have solutions, is applying just a piecemeal approach to a sustainable water cycle for Sydney. (Time expired)