Page 3866 - Week 13 - Thursday, 18 October 1990
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Mr Collaery: The Leader of the Opposition has not been here throughout the debate.
MR HUMPHRIES: Indeed. At least in the perception of some people, it is the most important issue. I stand corrected.
Mr Collaery: She has a ministerial salary, but she comes part time.
MR HUMPHRIES: Yes.
Mr Connolly: Mr Speaker, the Government members are cavorting about the floor, in bursts of laughter, trying to read things into Hansard, because they are going to send these speeches to the conservation council to attempt to impress upon it their concern, by the sheer volume of their words. Can we have a little less levity? We think Mr Humphries is funny, but it is not necessary to always be laughing.
MR HUMPHRIES: Mr Speaker, I assure members that I will not send my speech anywhere. Decades of unchecked industrial and agricultural expansion have led to severe problems of pollution of our sea, land and air. Incidentally, I think I should comment on the argument, which is often pushed, that pollution and environmental degradation are phenomena that are wholly tied up with capitalism and that it is the capitalists who produce these phenomena. I think it is worth looking at the environments of some other countries, such as eastern Europe, Poland and China, in particular, to realise that it is simply not the case. But we are moving out of that kind of split world. We are moving into a new world in which we share mutually the burdens of our problems. It means that we have to take a new view of the way in which we tackle them.
In the ACT, I think it is true to say, we are considerably luckier than other places in the world because of our very low levels of pollution and low levels of industrialisation giving rise to that kind of pollution. There is, however, no very good reason to be complacent about that. We have a great deal to protect, which means that sometimes additional measures are required because measures taken or problems arising elsewhere in this country or this world affect our environment. We have that mutual obligation to our fellow human beings to be part of the general clean-up of our planet which is getting under way at this time.
In the Chief Minister's tabling statement he said that the community will no longer accept superficial responses to the environment issues which we face. That is exactly why this Government has released a comprehensive and detailed strategy that will take the management of our environment into the next century. This document is not, as I think previous speakers have said, merely a collection of platitudes; it is a tangible, concrete expression of the way in which the Territory should proceed to avoid hazards that the future presents and to mitigate the mistakes of the past.
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