Water summit 'appallingly weak' November 07, 2006 THE Greens and the Australian Democrats have dismissed today's water crisis summit as an "appalling" talkfest that will do nothing to solve the problem.
The summit agreed to draw up contingency plans to secure water supplies for the next water year, beginning on June 1, with a working group of state and federal public servants to report back by December 15.
The Commonwealth has also agreed to speed up the implementation of proposals under the National Water Initiative, with permanent interstate trading to begin between NSW and Victoria on January 1 next year.
CSIRO has been asked to report progressively by the end of next year on sustainable yields of surface and groundwater systems within the Murray-Darling basin.
Water and climate change issues already are on the agenda for the next Council of Australian Governments (COAG) meeting next April.
The summit's outcome was weak, even appalling, and would do nothing to address the crisis, Greens senator Rachel Siewert said.
"What we've seen today is a talkfest by the governments of Australia with no real commitment to action on water," Senator Siewert said.
"They are relying on just trade, water trade essentially, to fix this problem."
She said Australian governments had overallocated waters from river systems.
"Trading won't fix it. We need hard decisions by government to address the issues of overallocation, to buy back leases, to take off this stupid ... requirement for conditional purchase.
"We need to be looking at non-conditional purchase of leases and we need to be tackling the issue of compulsory acquisition.
"The weak response of these governments is absolutely appalling."
Australian Democrats senator Andrew Bartlett said the governments had not made the hard decisions.
"We can't just keep fobbing things off with more reports, more meetings, more short-term emergency assistance," he said.
"If water trading is to work properly it will inevitably make water more expensive. Water is clearly, dramatically, underpriced."
Senator Bartlett said water trading might be a step along the way to a solution, but was not an end in itself.
"We do need to make sure that, if people are dramatically harmed by major rises in the price of water in a very short space of time, they do get assistance, so that the community as a whole shares in that cost," he said.
"But we're not sure if a loan, under water trading as it stands, will be enough to get water pricing anywhere near its real cost."
He said governments should be buying back water licences.
