Page 404 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 21 February 1990
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To assist that public information process, the Alliance Government has made public both its formal response to the project and the consultant study on economic impacts to which I referred earlier. Both are available over the counter at ACT Government shopfronts, and reference copies have been placed with the public library system.
The ACT VFT Advisory Committee has been actively seeking public views about the project and will report to the Government in April - and Ms Follett says that we are not consulting! She established the advisory committee. It is alive and well. It is doing the job for which she established it; it is out there consulting. But presumably she has forgotten about that since she has assumed the leadership of the Opposition. That committee has already played an important role in raising public awareness of the VFT and the many associated issues. A series of public meetings in early March will provide further opportunities for the public to learn more about the project and to provide views to the Government.
Ms Follett has also proposed that the Government undertake specific studies on the environmental and planning issues associated with the project, and I certainly agree. I would, however, point out that the VFT joint venture will be spending a significant proportion of the $20m that it has currently set aside for the feasibility study on environmental issues.
Our formal response contained advice to the joint venture on the types of issues that the ACT Government would wish to see included in these studies. It is inevitable that over the next two to three years there will be a need to investigate a wide range of matters, including the environmental, planning, social and economic impact, and the VFT Advisory Committee will be advising the Government on the need for specific studies as its process of inquiry proceeds.
The final matter in Ms Follett's motion relates to the need to take a national approach to the VFT. Again, I can only support her contention. The ACT is a member of the formal intergovernmental group on the VFT, which is charged with preparing coordinated responses to the key issues raised by the VFT proposal - the national approach that the Leader of the Opposition says that we should be taking. Not only are we engaged in it, we are also taking a leading role in that intergovernmental committee at the moment.
I understand that the group is close to finalising its first set of recommendations to member governments, and these recommendations will deal with the issues of environmental guidelines and assessment processes. Ms Follett is so far out of touch she is off the planet. A meeting of the group agency heads in Sydney last Monday considered a proposal to continue that coordinated approach into other areas of policy affected by the very fast train
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