Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .

Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1995 Week 8 Hansard (24 October) . . Page.. 1967 ..

MR WOOD (continuing):

If members read that - I will not have time to do it - they will see how importantly the commissioner regarded this recommendation. The Minister's response to this key recommendation - this is one of the key recommendations of the report - takes two or three sentences. He says, "We are progressively undertaking inventories". He did not say, "We will establish the survey unit as recommended". There are no additional resources put into anything. There is nothing new that is happening in this very crucial area. The recommendation has been dismissed with agreement, and in a couple of sentences of platitudes.

We now have a Flora and Fauna Committee set up as a result of the initiative of the former Minister. It is now up and running and we have approved the criteria that it set only last week. We had a clear path of action. The former Government knew exactly where it was going. We had this committee and we were beginning to get into the position where we could get the detailed knowledge we needed and move ahead; but the Liberals' budget gave no money, gave no support, and gave no enthusiasm to carry on those steps.

I will now go from talking about animal life and refer to the air. One of the recommendations talks about needing more meteorological stations. We need more monitoring of particulates of less than 10 micrometres in diameter. Again, we get some platitudes in the response. We have, or we are getting, one new station, but that was under way a year ago. That was part of the program of the former Government. I think it is now being constructed. We have some anxieties about the location, but that is now under way. The Minister does acknowledge that there are two stations now monitoring those smaller particulates, but that has been programmed for a while, and that is all that is happening. There is no further monitoring of the atmosphere in this town. It is not sufficient simply to say, as the Minister has, that we have wonderful clean air here and we do not have to worry too much. We need to assess very carefully, as Ms Horodny said, the impact of those particulates on people's health. We need to know first what those particulates are, where they are, in what parts of Canberra, and to what extent.

Recommendation 16, according to the Minister's numbering, calls for an improved means of measuring ground water depth and quality. There are some words about it. There is agreement, but there is nothing happening. Mr Humphries yesterday was out at Lake Ginninderra giving wonderful verbal support to National Water Week; but there is no physical support, there is no financial support, to do something more to find out the condition of our ground water. There is nothing there. Mere agreement that we need to know more is simply not sufficient.

Let me look at recommendation 24 on soil quality. This is an excellent example of how the Minister has simply glossed over all these aspects by giving agreement but doing nothing. (Extension of time granted) Recommendation 24 calls for "the establishment of a program to develop land quality indicators in the ACT". That is very important. There are a few paragraphs in this response. There is a quite potted statement here about how important it is and then the Government's response says this:

To be effective, the data needs to be electronically stored so interrogation and trends can be easily made spatially and over time.

Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .