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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 2 Hansard (28 February) . . Page.. 387 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

The slight reservation I indicated before was the question of the involvement of the Assembly at this stage. The commissioner, as I said, was involved in discussions with the Conservation Council on the issue. The Commissioner for the Environment, of course, is an environmental ombudsman, a person whose role it is to move into the community and determine issues that need to be addressed quite independently of government. He does not get told by government, "You will examine this, this and this issue, and that is all you will look at". He has a roving brief to pick up issues of concern. If the Assembly is, so to speak, showing him the way that he is going, then there is certainly no problem with that. Had it been the case that he had a different view of the matter - he might have felt, for example, that a public inquiry was not appropriate or that some other form of inquiry into this matter or inquiry at another level, say at a national level, was more appropriate - then it is possible that a motion of this kind would have cut across that. I notice that since I raised the issue with Ms Horodny last week she has included Commissioner Baker as the chair of the inquiry. I gather that she has had discussions with him or his office subsequent to that discussion, and that has facilitated the clearing up of that problem. If that is the case, I do not have a particular problem with this inquiry.

I also want to indicate that I believe that it is important that we do not overlook the mechanisms that are already in place for management of dangerous chemicals. One of the first pieces of legislation this Assembly enacted back in 1989 was the Pesticides Act, which put in place for the first time some fairly comprehensive controls on the use of dangerous chemicals in the ACT for the purposes of weed and pest control. That was a major step forward. Since that time we have also been able to take part in the national registration scheme for these sorts of chemicals. That is part of our obligation under that national obligation to have pesticides legislation and to have our regime for the use of those chemicals controlled on a national level. Under that scheme chemicals used for weed and pest control are registered nationally by the National Registration Authority. The terms of registration include labelling which describes the purposes for which those chemicals can be used and how they are to be applied; that is, there is an expectation, and I think it is the reality, that certainly governmental users of chemicals under that scheme use the chemicals consistent with the labelling. If a chemical is labelled for certain purposes in certain circumstances, then it can be used for those purposes and in those circumstances. That certainly assists in making sure that the chemicals are at least being used in a standard way across the country.

I would be concerned if the effect of this motion were to say that we should start to devise a separate ACT registration system or separate application system from the national scheme. Perhaps Ms Horodny does not intend that and perhaps it is not envisaged that that is what the inquiry might turn up. If there were some feeling that we did not have a sufficiently tight control over the sorts of chemicals being used or if, for example, there were a view that the chemical X was too dangerous and had been labelled or treated too lightly under the national scheme and there should therefore be some proposal to have the ACT outside that scheme, have an add-on to the scheme or have some variation to the scheme to give us the extra control that we wanted, then I would be concerned, because we would then be setting up our own mechanism for dealing differently with the process. The capacity for comparison and control at the national level and for uniform regulation would disappear.

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