Chris Bowen (Prospect, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would like to take this opportunity to inform the House that a very prestigious water conservation award has been awarded to a very important institution in my electorate of Prospect—the Cumberland Country Golf Club. The Cumberland Country Golf Club is a very important institution in the Greystanes community. It is, in many respects, the social centre of Greystanes. We all know that golf courses have the potential to take a lot of water. But the Cumberland Country Golf Club has achieved the highest percentage reduction for 2008 at Sydney Water’s ‘Every Drop Counts’ water efficiency awards.

They have embarked on a number of very innovative and exciting projects to achieve this result, including: the trucking of treated water from sewerage treatment plants; using recycled ground and surface water from the nearby Boral Quarry to irrigate greens; halving the time of the irrigation system’s night-time cycle; retrofitting taps and toilets in the clubhouse; installing a 2,000-litre water tank used to increase the instances of hand watering; installing a 5,400-litre water tank, capturing rainwater from course buildings to be used in cleaning, saving approximately 29,000 litres of water just from washing the course’s golf carts; and, perhaps most significantly, constructing a water pipeline underground to pump ground and storm water from the site of the Boral Quarry at Prospect to the Cumberland golf club.

This has taken a significant community collaboration involving Boral, the Dexus Property Group, Holroyd City Council, Fairfield City Council, Sydney Water, the Department of Water and Energy, and Greystanes Public School. All these measures have resulted in an 82 per cent reduction in water usage at Cumberland golf club, and I wanted to take this opportunity to congratulate them for this award. In particular, I mention: the members of the water committee—Phil Burge, Ross Selleck, Fraser Stevenson, and Noel Ponton; the course superintendent, Mark Crittenden; past club president, Bob Angus; current president, Michael Poe; and the general manager, Ian Cottle. This is something that the Greystanes community is very proud of and that I am very proud of.

My golf skills are nonexistent, despite many efforts, and I have now, I am happy to inform the House, retired from golf because I find it too frustrating given the amount of time I have to play, which is minimal. But I give my best wishes to the Cumberland golf club on their excellent efforts in saving water, which is a great result for the Greystanes community and of course the Sydney community as a whole.