CC. WATER CONSERVATION AND IRRIGATION. 
volumes of water, with all its potentialities of wealth and 
progress run to waste. 
In Victoria they had spent nine million pounds altogether 
on water conservation, storage, and irrigation, and people 
were running down irrigation and spoke as though they 
were under the impression that most of the losses in 
Victoria were due to irrigation. But the writing off that 
had been done there included relief to local bodies, mining 
communities, as well as country districts, and only a 
moiety applied to irrigation. But though the expenditure 
on water had not paid interest directly, the indirect benefit 
to the State far more than compensated for the outlay. 
In the country districts, a system of Trusts have been 
established of two kinds, one for domestic and stock supply 
and the other for irrigation. The first were called Water 
Works Trusts, the latter Water Supply and Irrigation Trusts. 
The first included Urban Trusts and Rural Trusts, and they 
did not deal with irrigation though a little might be done 
from them, but were intended for State and domestic pur- . 
poses only. The Water Works Trusts were initiated by 
the local municipal bodies by petition, which was open for 
inspection for a certain time, and if no objections were 
lodged the scheme went on, In some cases the municipal 
body controlled the administration, in others commissioners 
elected under the act did so. While in the Rural Trusts a 
large sum had to be written down, the Urban on the whole 
had paid their way fairly well. The procedure for con- 
stituting an Irrigation Trust was different. In this a 
petition to the Governor was prepared signed by half the 
land owners in the proposed district. In this petition the 
scheme of works was set out: the area and description of 
the land, the sources and quantity of water to be supplied, 
the proposed extent of rating, the estimated cost of the © 
scheme, and the anticipated charges required for main- 
