KANGALOON AQUIFER NEWS UPDATE

A copy of the letter from Save Our Water Alliance Inc. to Mr Graeme Head, Chief Executive, Sydney Catchment Authority delivered to him in Sydney yesterday, 27th December 2006, is attached.

The NSW government and the Sydney Catchment Authority is brazenly ignoring all the highly respected scientific advice it has sought and received that it should not proceed with this proposal until a minimum five year moratorium has been had to enable a base line study to be undertaken. A base line study is an environmental audit of the status quo of the Kangaloon aquifer as it currently exists and, to have any value, must be undertaken over a number of seasons and during different climatic conditions as may exist during the minimum moratorium period aforesaid. The base line study would provide the essential yard stick against which any environmental damage caused by the borefield proposal can be immediately tested and measured.

Further, the government is resisting all political pressure aimed at having it shelve this dangerous and irresponsible initiative.

Accordingly, the Save Our Water Alliance (of which, along with a representative Councillor of Wingecarribee Shire Council and other community luminaries, I am a member as a representative of NSW Farmers Association) has now taken Counsel's opinion and we are moving forward to prepare the ground work to urgently seek an injunction in the Land & Environment Court of NSW to restrain this environmental vandalism.

The Alliance seeks the support of all members of the Southern Highlands community in seeking to explore this possible legal remedy and, in due course, if the Alliance determines, on the advice of its legal team, to proceed with the Court action, we will be asking the community for financial support to set up a Fighting Fund to defray the legal costs that will be necessarily incurred in putting a stop to this borefield development.

We have our lawyers preparing a ballpark estimate of the likely legal costs of the action as we speak.

I will keep you posted with respect to this matter.

Other issues the Alliance is focussing on include:

1. the Iemma government's flouting of the important 'precautionary principle' that is enshrined in environmental laws in NSW and its serious breaches of the (NSW) Environmental Planning and Assessment Act 1979, the Wingecarribee Shire Council LEP, the (NSW) Threatened Species Conservation Act 1999, the Commonwealth EPBC Act 1999 and the National Water Initiative 2005;
   
   
2. articulating the Upper Nepean Groundwater Community Reference Group's recommendations contained in its report to the Iemma government and the fact that this report has been buried by the government as it does not suit their purposes;
   the likely need to fell a massive number of trees along the environmentally sensitive western side of Tourist Road to bring 3 phase power to the Kangaloon borefield along with other environmental travesties that are being committed by the Iemma government in the Kangaloon area;
   
   
3. the cost benefit nonsense of threatening and causing all these very irresponsible environmental outcomes for a paltry gain of only 7 days water supply per annum for Sydney consumers;
   
   
4. the question of why the Greens, as a political party, along with Matt Brown MLA (State Member for Kiama), are strangely missing in action on the Kangaloon borefield? and the disgraceful conflict of interest that exists between SCA and NPWS and is perpetuated and presided over by Minister Debus as Minister of Environment and Conservation and which is seeing NPWS effectively muzzled in this debate.
   

We will be repeating these simple messages over and over again and will continue seeking to secure the broadest possible coverage we can achieve in the local and the Sydney metropolitan media until these messages finally get through to the voting public.


Jonathan Bell OAM, Chairman, NSW Farmers Association Sydney Water Catchment Taskforce.