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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1995 Week 11 Hansard (12 December) . . Page.. 2922 ..

MR OSBORNE: I present Report No. 17 of 1995 of the Standing Committee on Scrutiny of Bills and Subordinate Legislation. I ask for leave to make a brief statement on the report.

Leave granted.

MR OSBORNE: Report No. 17 of 1995 contains the committee's comments on three Bills and nine pieces of subordinate legislation. I commend the report to the Assembly.

MR KAINE (5.15): I present the report of the Standing Committee on Economic Development and Tourism entitled "Expansion of Nature Based Tourism in the ACT", together with extracts from the minutes of proceedings. I move:

That the report be noted.

I think that I would have to say that in my years in this Assembly this was one of the most pleasurable and interesting inquiries that I have been involved in. At the back of the report there is a list of the written submissions received and the witnesses who attended. Those people presented a broad spectrum of opinion on the issues that the committee was examining. I found them interesting. I thank the people who made submissions and appeared as witnesses for the amount of work that they put into their presentations to the committee. A quick look through the index to the report will show that these people dealt with many different aspects of the proposition that we should perhaps open up Namadgi National Park, the nature parks and the Murrumbidgee Corridor to greater use by tourists.

Mr Speaker, I will not dwell on the report. It was put together by Margaret Jones and Chris Papadopoulos. It is an excellent report and I thank them for the work that they did in putting it together. We did acquire a great deal of information and it was a matter of sifting it and deciding which should go in the report and which could be left out.

The bottom line is that the committee is agreed that there is a potential in these areas for attracting additional tourists to the Territory. While our report recommends certain actions that would, we hope, increase the number of tourists who come to Canberra specifically to get into these areas and have a look at our natural attractions, we were, and remain, cognisant of the fact that Namadgi National Park in particular is an area that

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