Page 3913 - Week 12 - Tuesday, 29 November 2022
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As members will recall, Ms Clay’s motion called on the government to investigate this reform, conduct community consultation and meet with stakeholders. It further called on the government to report back to the Assembly by the first day of the last sitting week in 2022—that is, today—with the substance of these consultations and a time frame for introducing the right to a healthy environment. Today I will table the Listening Report of the YourSay Conversations consultation, and I am pleased to provide this further statement to the Assembly detailing that consultation and the next steps.
On 30 June 2022, the government launched a discussion paper and an online survey via YourSay. We hosted a public panel discussion to kickstart that community conversation. The consultation was open for eight weeks and closed on 31 August 2022. We reached over 550 people via YourSay and we received 40 pieces of written feedback, which included 22 written submissions and 18 survey responses. We engaged with over 40 organisations, and our public panel attracted more than 30 in-person participants and logged another 30 online views.
During the conversation, we heard from organisations and individuals representing the interests of the environmental movement; the community sector; healthcare providers; the business and property sectors; ACT community councils; Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health research; and community health research. Submissions and survey responses came from individuals of all ages, grassroots environmental and community groups that are involved in environmental initiatives, as well as organisations that represent the interests of people with chronic health conditions impacted by the environment. We also heard from many of the more prominent advocacy organisations engaged in activism for human rights and the environment within the ACT and nationally.
Through the public consultation, we sought the community’s views on the implications, benefits and challenges of protecting the right to a healthy environment and other wider considerations for implementation. The community responses expressed strong support for introducing the right to a healthy environment into the Human Rights Act. This was seen as a positive initiative to place people and community at the centre of environmental protection and recognise the importance to our collective wellbeing of restoring and protecting the environment.
The feedback noted that a range of benefits would flow from recognising the right to a healthy environment, including greater awareness and dialogue of environmental impacts and encouraging more ambitious goals to protect our environment and climate for a sustainable future. In particular, it was considered that the right would have significant benefits for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, who hold a unique relationship to country as traditional owners and custodians and who are disproportionately impacted by climate change, environmental degradation, loss of biodiversity and the consequential adverse health and wellbeing impacts.
We also received a diverse range of feedback on how the right to a healthy environment should be expressed. The community told us it could be described as a safe and accessible place for work and recreation or an environment that sustains and
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