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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 2 Hansard (28 February) . . Page.. 441 ..

Mr Humphries: Caused by different weather patterns in Tuggeranong, I understand - the ones we now monitor.

MR WOOD: Yes, indeed. We can get into an examination of temperature inversions, if you like, Mr Humphries. This legislation is important. It substantially completes, I hope, the work that was done when I was Minister to try to moderate the emissions coming from household chimneys. It is no longer acceptable for them to be pouring forth quite an amount of muck, as a few do, and I will be pleased when the legislation is in place and enforced.

MR HUMPHRIES (Attorney-General and Minister for the Environment, Land and Planning) (5.07), in reply: In closing this debate, I want to indicate my thanks to members for their support for the legislation. It is quite significant legislation. Let me make it quite clear that this is an important step. Members will hear more about this because there will be people complaining very long and very hard to them about the consequences of this legislation when they are told by inspectors from the Pollution Control Authority that they have to do something about the smoke coming out of their chimneys. So this is an important step, and I am glad that members acknowledge the significance of what we are doing today.

Mr Berry: If they complain to me about the smoke coming out of my chimney I will be worried, because I do not have one.

MR HUMPHRIES: It is the hot air coming out of your mouth that they have most to complain about, Mr Berry, not the smoke coming out of your chimney. I see that even with this quite important step - I thought it was a quite consensual step - I still was not able to get much approval from Mr Berry. I sometimes wonder whether, if I walked down to the edge of Lake Burley Griffin and walked across it to the other side, I would see a press release from Mr Berry's office saying, "Gary Humphries can't swim", such is his criticism of this Government's performance. He is determined that we do not do anything right, and the environment is particularly the case here.

This is a good step that we all have to accept is an important way of extending protections available to people in our community who suffer from the effect of smoke in their homes, particularly in places like Tuggeranong, as mentioned by Mr Wood, where there are serious problems. People complain about medical conditions exacerbated by smoke, they complain about their amenity being affected by smoke coming in their windows, they complain about smoke soiling their clothes. These are all very real problems, and we are now coming to accept that people have no automatic right to burn wood in their homes and cause those problems for other people.

Mr Berry suggested that more resources are needed to make all this work. He may be right. I will have to find out what happens as we develop this strategy in the community. I might say that my advice is very clear that most people do responsibly use their stoves and their fireplaces. I think most people with those sorts of appliances in their homes use them responsibly. They do not use wet wood; they do not use green wood; they use practices that result in the appropriate amount of air coming through the appliances;

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