Page 1354 - Week 05 - Thursday, 26 April 1990
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environmental platform, which was released in January, can be implemented within the next five years. This policy will bring together all the issues relating to the environment as one set of principles which can be implemented in a coordinated way.
It is important, as I have just outlined, that a government should have an overall vision of the environment and a set of principles to put this vision into practice. Individual proposals can then be examined against the principles to ensure that they are consistent with our overall goal. It is only when we put these principles into effect that we can hope to achieve a coordinated set of activities across the ACT, leading to desired objectives.
The Government's environmental strategy will be published soon and will provide both the overall vision for the ACT environment and the framework for the more specific environmental policies that my Government is developing. In our first year in office we are giving priority to developing strategies to address the greenhouse effect and for recycling, energy conservation and sustainable development.
We are giving urgent attention to the report on waste management recently tabled by the Standing Committee on Conservation, Heritage and Environment. Its report on an integrated energy resources policy, which we expect to be tabled in a couple of months, will also be a high priority for the Government.
Protection of the environment has important implications for future economic development for the ACT. What use is economic growth and its associated benefits if our environment is seriously degraded? Unless economic decisions are ecologically rational, we will be unable to maintain, let alone improve, the standard and quality of our living.
Recognising this interdependence between environmental protection and economic growth, this Government is developing policies which will ensure that development decisions made now do not compromise the environmental quality of the ACT of the future.
To help in the management of our integrated approach to the environment, a variety of mechanisms have been established to ensure that environmental policies are consistent across all functional activities within the Government. This will also ensure that environmental implications are adequately and comprehensively addressed whenever they occur. These mechanisms include the interdepartmental committee on environmental policy, which is responsible for identifying and recommending solutions for the big environmental issues which confront the ACT. Also, the interdepartmental committee on environmental quality provides a forum for the exchange of expert and technical information and ensures that information on new developments is shared across agencies within the Government.
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