Page 980 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 26 July 1989
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final practice and is no longer waiving that connection fee. I use this opportunity to urge it to reinstate that practice so that people can be encouraged to use natural gas.
There are particular advantages for the Canberra community. Natural gas is not just a fuel that is used for business, but it has particular advantages in terms of avoiding some of our wood use and pollution problems. Environmental issues are raised by the use of natural gas. Natural gas, of course, is a non-renewable resource - in the short term, not in terms of hundreds of millions of years, granted - but it is to all intents and purposes a non-renewable resource. It is a very clean and useful non-renewable resource which may give us time to get our use of energy into balance. Therefore, from an environmental point of view it is quite critical that we use it wisely and as a method of encouraging people to refrain from using other fossil fuels, such as heating oil and electricity that is produced from basic fossil fuel methods - coal and so forth.
Another point I would like to raise with AGL is the business of digging up the streets and then getting them back to norm. It has been AGL's practice - I have noticed it in my street - to dig up the naturestrip lawns, replace the soil and then plant the grass on top of it. It has, by and large, been particularly careful about doing that, but I would encourage it to go back three months later and have a look at the big line you can still see down the street as things subside. Another sprinkling of soil at that point would, I think, be particularly advantageous to the general area because that extra little bit of effort would, I am sure, mean that basically no sign is left of where it had been. That is not to take away from the efforts that it has already made.
It is important to note about this legislation that with all these things so far we have relied on the goodwill of AGL - by and large that has been the case - but there have been no legal bindings on it which of course we ought to require. It is this Bill that is in draft form that really should come before us so that we can look at what legal bindings we feel are appropriate. It is particularly of concern that some of those legal bindings will have to do with the environment, safety matters and business practices.
I draw your attention to Mr Collaery's comment about a single trench and the various different services that we run down trenches. I noticed some laughter about a suggestion that water, gas and electricity should be laid in the same trench, but running those services together in a wide trench is quite reasonable when they are then buried and separated by the soil between them. The concept of digging three, or even two, different trenches is simply a matter for the final people who have to pay for them - the residents of Canberra. They are the ones about whom we
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