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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1995 Week 9 Hansard (23 November) . . Page.. 2470 ..

Mr Moore: When was the last time you went to Ainslie Transfer Station?

MR HUMPHRIES: I went there about 18 months ago. I have been there five or six times in my life and I visit Revolve regularly. In fact, my father dropped off a number of lights there only last week. We use Revolve quite regularly.

It is true that we did not put up in lights the fact that we were going to introduce domestic tip fees, but I must say that that is a very strange criticism. Ms Follett accuses us of duplicity about that subject. I recall, first of all, that the former Government introduced commercial tip fees also without advertising its position prior to the election. Did I miss the press release before the 1992 election advertising commercial tip fees? Did I miss a part in the ACT Labor Party platform?

Mr De Domenico: Did you see the one that said that introducing big bins was environmental madness?

MR HUMPHRIES: That is right, yes. I do remember the bit about big bins doing environmental damage. I seem to have overlooked the Labor Party's explicit advance notice that they were introducing commercial tip fees. This is Labor logic, of course. It is okay for a Labor government to introduce commercial tip fees without notice. That is responsible. When a Liberal government introduces domestic tip fees without notice, that is duplicitous. Great! I think we all understand where we come from with the Labor Party.

I also point out that, at the time the Labor Party introduced tip fees, the then Liberal spokesman on urban services, Mr Lou Westende, issued a press release indicating that we thought it was wrong to charge only the commercial sector for use of the tips; it should be across the board, commercial and domestic, at the same time. So the Liberal Party did indicate very clearly its view about these matters. I stand by those decisions. It is not responsible to encourage unlimited use of our tips as if waste sites were an unlimited resource in this community. They are not. We should be telling our community in no uncertain terms that those sites are a limited resource and we should be conserving them. The best way to conserve them is to make people value the use of those sites by charging for them.

MR DE DOMENICO (Minister for Urban Services) (11.13): Let me speak very quickly in response to Mr Moore. We are currently looking at bringing in a new milk bottling machine from New South Wales. We are currently negotiating along those lines to make sure that we continue to use milk bottles.

MR WHITECROSS (11.14): The Liberal Government was saved by the New South Wales Labor Government on the milk bottle thing. It was lucky the New South Wales Minister stepped in and told their milk people they could not get rid of glass bottles, otherwise you would be in like Flynn getting rid of them.

A couple of fascinating things have come from the Chief Minister tonight in the course of her discussion of the urban services budget, showing her limited capacity to follow abstract argument. She quoted from last year's Estimates Committee report reflecting on across-the-board efficiency dividends of 2 per cent, and sought to compare that with

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