Page 469 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 28 June 1989
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It is only quite recently that the subject of the conservation and protection of the environment has become a matter of public interest. In fact, there are a lot of people who have not even begun to appreciate the importance of it yet. So I think it is not incumbent on any of us to start claiming that we are suddenly the champions of this and we invented it. We did not. It is because there is an increasing realisation of the fact that the our environment is becoming, and perhaps even has become, one of the top two or three issues in Australian politics today. We all have to recognise that and we all have to do what that implies, because the general population out there has become concerned about the things that mankind has done and is continuing to do to our environment. I do not intend to traverse all of those; they are all well known.
But I think what is now important is that in our little part of the world it is incumbent on the 17 people in this Assembly now to address that problem and do something about it. It seems to me that there is a common accord on that. I do not think there is anybody sitting on the floor of this house who disputes that the environment is probably the most important issue, perhaps after finance, that we have to face up to. That was the reason why the Liberals first proposed the particular standing committee that now exists, because we recognised that it was one of the major issues on the political agenda.
The fact that the Rally has now brought forward this particular inquiry is a good thing. I would hope that the particular standing committee over the life of this Assembly would be one of the busiest committees that we have got. There are so many issues that it has to deal with, and there will be all kinds of references to it over the coming weeks and months.
Having said that, and looking particularly at the motion that Mr Moore has put forward, I think that the committee is going to find itself a little ambivalent; in fact, it is going to become schizophrenic in trying to deal with the reference that he is putting to it. In the opening lines he is asking the committee to inquire into and report on "an integrated environment policy". To me that means every aspect of the environment. What he is really doing is giving the committee a job that could keep it busy for the next 10 years, and it still would not have time to deal with every aspect of the environment policy.
I would submit that there is no way that by the first sitting day of 1990 this committee could come back with an "integrated environment policy". There are a lot of organisations around the world, and indeed in Australia, trying to cope with that problem, and I do not believe that it is possible in the time frame that we are talking about to do it. But if you then read on and look at the words that follow that opening part of the motion, you see that what the Rally and what Mr Moore are talking about is energy use and its consequences for the environment. That
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