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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 6 Hansard (23 May) . . Page.. 1725 ..

Clauses 15 to 20, by leave, taken together, and agreed to.

Heading to Part III

MS TUCKER (5.18): I move:

Page 11, line 21, after "FINANCIAL" insert "AND ENVIRONMENTAL".

Mr Speaker, I am going to speak to amendments Nos 1 and 2 circulated in my name, as the first amendment, which changes the heading, is really contingent on the second amendment being supported. All members of the Assembly would say that they do have some concern about the environment and recognise the need to protect it. The Greens want to go further than that. We want all government departments, all industries and all people to care about the environment. After all, it is the environment which is fundamental to our future. We do not want the environment to be just tacked on as an afterthought. Neither should social considerations be tacked on as an afterthought.

Integrating social and environmental concerns should be central to our economic decisions and accounting systems. Unfortunately, it is not. Our accounting systems are good at telling us how much money is in the bank, but not much about real life. Marilyn Waring sums it up quite well in her book Counting for Nothing. She says that all the things that she values about life - mountain streams with safe drinking water, accessibility of national parks, beaches and lakes, community work and so on - count for absolutely nothing in the Federal budgets or in the system of national accounts. The exploitation of natural resources for economic gain has been an inherent part of development. On the other hand, wars, oil spills, nuclear energy disasters, gun massacres, car accidents and any other number of environmental and social bads are good for the economy because of the services that they create.

The Greens are seeking to incorporate a system of environmental accounting into this Financial Management Bill. Any sensible economist knows that it is not sensible to run down capital; but economists have never counted soils, forests, clean water or other species as capital. It is time for change. Mrs Carnell said in her presentation speech that capital is a scarce resource. We agree. But so is natural capital. We are seeking to make the ACT Government's accounting system more representative of what is going on in the real world in a small way. Governments are attempting to take a longer view by introducing measures such as accrual accounting into their financial systems; but, still, we do not consider the environment, or human capital for that matter.

The Greens think annual economic statements should be telling us not only about our financial assets and liabilities but also about our environmental assets and liabilities. We want to know how clean our water is, how much energy we are using, how much waste we are producing, and how many grasslands are left. The native grasslands of the ACT have value at both a local level and a global level. They are more important than a bulldozer in the Department of Urban Services. We have a commitment to be reducing greenhouse gases. Are we? We do not really have any comprehensive way of knowing.

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