Page 5801 - Week 18 - Tuesday, 10 December 1991
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I am pleased to see that the current Minister has finally taken up the cudgels left by my colleagues Mr Duby and Mr Collaery. I trust that he and his colleague Mr Wood will ensure that sufficient funds are provided to enable proper monitoring of the lead levels in the air, particularly in the Civic area.
MRS NOLAN (4.56): Very briefly, I must say that I do welcome this amendment Bill. It has been some time coming. I would have thought that it would have arrived before us before this, but at last it has been placed before us and I am sure that it will have universal support. All parties and members in the Assembly, I am sure, will be supporting it.
The only concern I have is in relation to the penalty clauses. I issue a caution perhaps, in terms of government legislation, about the different sorts of figures that are now creeping in in relation to amounts for penalties. I would hope that there is a little more coordination done in relation to penalties. Perhaps this is one area that could have been looked at a little more closely. I support the penalties in their current state, but I suggest that the Government take it on board and look at a much better way of collating those penalties and seeing just how relevant they are in terms of all the legislation that is currently available. I support the Bill as it is before us.
MR HUMPHRIES (4.57): Mr Deputy Speaker, I also welcome the Bill and note that it caps off a trend in the ACT towards better levels of breathable air. We have had evidence that the lead levels have been reducing over a period in the ACT, and that has been very welcome. I have to say that when I was Minister for Health I was questioned on several occasions by a particular journalist to whom Mr Collaery referred about the levels of lead in the atmosphere in the ACT. A case was made, based on one occasion in Civic and one occasion in Woden when lead levels did exceed national air quality guidelines, that somehow the ACT had a problem. I was not convinced that the ACT did have a problem. I believed that through the effluxion of time more than anything else, and through the affluence of the ACT and the purchasing patterns of our citizens, we would have seen a very steady but very marked reduction in lead levels in the ACT.
This Bill deals with one aspect of lead levels, and that is the high lead content in leaded petrol. I think that the agreement that the Alliance Government was able to reach in May of this year with the Institute of Petroleum was a welcome step towards ensuring that that trend downwards was going to continue and not be reversed. It is worth bearing in mind that at all stages we were negotiating on a matter on which the ACT had relatively little leverage. It is the case that the ACT has been seen as a somewhat poor cousin by petrol companies. Often we missed out when other places in Australia, perhaps nearer to major ports such as Sydney and Melbourne, were catered for. We were left to one side.
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