Page 4073 - Week 15 - Thursday, 17 December 1992
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Ms Szuty also raised - again I take this as a confirmation of our process - the question of smoke haze, our response to the valley and the temperature inversion that may well occur there. We have acted. Would you not say that it is fairly dramatic action for a Minister to stand up and say, with a little bit of reserve, "We are not going to allow solid-fuel heating"? That is pretty strong action to undertake. It is a measure of how strong we are in our determination here. (Extension of time granted)
Ms Szuty concluded, and this hurt, by saying that if we had had a more open and consultative approach people would not be complaining. I will listen to any comments that anybody wants to make about how we may improve our processes, because we are interested in refining them. We are committed to consultation. If people can tell me how we can do it better, I will listen, and I will do it if I can see merit in it. That is an issue that hurts me with this, because I think there is no question that this has been a most open procedure. It has been there for two years and there have been six distinct points for public discussion.
Because of the time, I will not go into the detail of it all; but it began in mid-1990 when the Parliamentary Joint Committee on the ACT held public hearings on the National Capital Plan. That included debate on this, and that is where this was first raised. I guess that you know the other steps. In addition to that, we had an election and that has not always been the case. If there was anything that people did not know about, if there was any failure on our part to inform the community - and there had not been - you can be sure that at the time of the election everything was there for debate. It was all up there for grabs, if you like.
Mr Kaine: Except the "pink bits", Bill.
MR WOOD: That is precisely the point, Mr Kaine. The draft plan was perhaps the major issue of the election. Was there something more significant? There were a number of issues, but it was a major issue. So, in the whole process of consultation the issue of West Belconnen was right there at the top of the list. I know the letters I wrote, and the letterboxing that was done and the doorknocking that was done, and there were not too many people out there who did not know about it. I do not know how the process could have been more open. Then we had that further process of referral to the standing committee. This has been exhaustively debated. I have commented, I believe, that the approach taken by Ms Szuty has actually been an endorsement of our process because of the particular issues that she raised, but I will make a bit of a complaint about this claim that it was not open or was not consultative enough.
I think I will leave it there, Madam Speaker. I have commented on what Mr Moore and Mr Kaine said and this is a good point to close on. They said that ultimately the Assembly has to decide. It is for us to decide, and we must bear in mind the broad community interest while always having clearly in our minds the interests of every citizen in the ACT.
MS SZUTY (11.34), in reply: I take it that there are no further speakers on this disallowance motion. I would like to comment briefly on the issues that have been raised by other speakers in this debate. Firstly, Mr Kaine mentioned that committee members had time to consider the West Belconnen variation. I would take some issue with that. I think we could have had a bit more time, but I do not see that as the major issue. The major issue was that the community had not had time to look at the final environmental impact statement and the
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