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House of Assembly - Fifty-First Parliament, Third Session (51-3)
2008-11-27 Daily Xml
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WATER RESTRICTIONS

Mr WILLIAMS (MacKillop) (14:39): My question is to the Minister for Water Security. Why can the Victorian and Queensland governments maintain water restrictions based on volume of use per household but the South Australian government cannot? In Queensland and Victoria an amount of water is allowed per household. Our Minister for Water Security has dismissed this system. She says this is because, 'It would be a very difficult administrative exercise to bring that into play'—

The Hon. M.J. Atkinson interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Order, the Attorney!

The Hon. M.J. Atkinson interjecting:

Mr WILLIAMS: I am reading verbatim from struggling grammar. She continues:

There are a whole heap of complications there. How many people are in each household; how many people move house during the course of the year; how do you keep track of household use?

The opposition is informed that in Queensland and Victoria households often have different sizes, and people also, from time to time, move.

The Hon. K.A. MAYWALD (Chaffey—Minister for the River Murray, Minister for Water Security) (14:41): It never ceases to amaze me how a little bit of the information can be interpreted so incorrectly. One of the problems with the shadow minister is that he fails to understand what is happening in other states—first and foremost—and then asks a question about what South Australia's opinion is to something completely different to what Queensland and Victoria are doing.

Queensland and Victoria are not making allocations to individual households; they are not doing that. It is as simple as that. They are not allocating water to individual households or individuals. They are not applying an individual allocation. What they are doing is setting a target, and saying, 'Let's try to get to this amount per household.' They are not setting an allocation. The question that I was asked, and answered, that the shadow minister has now quoted into Hansard, was about providing an allocation to households, that each individual in each household should have an allocation—very different to having a target.

If you were to endeavour to allocate a certain amount to each person, it would be a highly complex system to actually administer, and it would have all those problems of householders changing, the number of people in each house, householders moving, and all those sorts of things. What they have done in Queensland and Victoria is set a target. They have said, 'We'd like to see on average across the board'; they are not going in and saying, 'You choose whether you use water inside or outside the house. We'll give you an allocation per person, and you choose whether you use it inside or outside the house.' What Melbourne is actually doing is saying, 'We're still going to have level 3A restrictions, but we want you to try harder, and if you can we want to get the average across this state down to around about 150 per person.' Great; it is a terrific target. It is not an allocation to each individual person—a very different thing; and I think the shadow minister should understand that.

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