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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 2 Hansard (28 February) . . Page.. 442 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

and they keep the smoke fairly clean. I think those sorts of people are not the major concern of this legislation. The people we are concerned about are the people who consistently do not care about what impact their smoke has on other people, and they are the ones we are going to target. To some extent we know who they are already, and this legislation will help us do something about them.

I was intrigued by the comment that legislation not enforced is not worth while. It is an interesting comment and a good comment I would agree with. Members might recall that, in about the middle of the last Assembly, I tabled in this place a list of legislation that had been enacted over the preceding three years. I had asked a question on how many prosecutions had been launched under legislation where we had enacted all sorts of new penalties and new offences. Almost none of those offences had produced any new prosecutions, indicating at that stage that we had put a great deal of legislation on the statute books and had not enforced it. So Mr Berry is right; but I think he needs to ask himself whether he has not contributed to that problem, rather than simply watching us do so.

There will have to be a careful process of consultation with the community about what those standards for smoke might be. There is an easy way of setting a standard. You can get a quite expensive piece of equipment and stick it on top of someone's chimney. That measures the amount of smoke coming out of the chimney and will tell you whether certain smoke levels are excessive or not. Of course, that device is impracticable; you cannot do that in the vast majority of cases, and therefore we have to set a standard which is much more subjective. That is why, with this legislation being passed through the Assembly - I think that before this it has probably been premature - we can now work on what that standard should be in terms of the legislation and we can set it in place. I think three months is long enough to do that, and I hope that that will be a process we can agree on.

As I said at the outset, there will be plenty of discussion about that, and we are all likely to get angry calls and letters about the way in which a particular stove or fireplace has been - - -

Mr Wood: Have these standards been set yet?

MR HUMPHRIES: No, the standards will be set now that the legislation has been passed.

Mr Wood: You have had time to get things moving.

MR HUMPHRIES: I do not agree, Mr Wood, that we should have been setting standards before the legislation on which those standards will be based was passed through the Assembly. That would have been quite wrong, and I do not agree with that suggestion. I indicate that now is the appropriate time to start, after today's debate. As I said, it is important that we offer that sort of protection. People do need to be able to rely upon a certain quality of air, and in the past we have not been able to provide that because of this exemption in the Air Pollution Act. I am pleased that this exemption will

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