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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 6 Hansard (23 May) . . Page.. 1727 ..

ENVIRONMENTAL". (continuing):

The starting point for the development of environmental accounts is to develop these physical accounts. They are presented as satellite accounts which are subsidiary to the core accounts. That means that they are not fully integrated into the main accounts. Obviously, accounts expressed in physical units are necessary before you can even begin to translate any of the measurements into monetary units. You cannot value everything and, indeed, we may not want to. But the physical accounts themselves are a very powerful decision-making tool. If we had more information about the impact of economic activities on the natural environment, it would help us to make better decisions, particularly medium- to longer-term planning.

As we all know, many of the resources consumed by the ACT come from outside, and this will also give us a better overall impression of what the ACT's impact on the environment is from a public sector perspective. It will help us to determine the ecological footprint, if you like, of the ACT Government. It will also provide us with better information upon which to develop environmental indicators and targets. It will help us to explore the impacts of various policy measures. It is a very weak argument indeed to say that we cannot start this process now because we do not have all the data. It is this pathetic inaction on the part of politicians that has been the reason for the virtual failure of the whole ESD process. Very few governments have been willing to implement the institutional changes which put the theory into practice. It is easy to say, "Yes, we integrate economic and environmental decisions", but we do not. And why do we not? Because governments and oppositions love to say that they care about the environment, but they care about the economy first and foremost. But with no environment there will be no economy.

I know that an argument is going to be put forward that this is the role of the Commissioner for the Environment. For a start, the commissioner is not an economist. But the most important argument is, once again, about making sure that we make all government departments responsible for caring for the environment. We want the left hand and the right hand to actually work together. At the risk of being repetitive, that is the whole point of sustainable development. It is about internal consistency in decision-making. It is about making the bodies responsible for creating environmental damage also responsible for developing policies to prevent the degradation of our environment. We have many environmental agencies now in Australia, but most of their work is focused on repairing damage. We need to give more responsibility to all agencies, particularly economic agencies.

Much of the information that is necessary for these accounts is probably already available, but it is not being brought together in a systematic way integrated with the economic accounts. No-one would expect this system to be very sophisticated at all for the first few years. We learn only by trying, and by making mistakes. That is how the State of the Environment Report got off the ground. The ACT could become a real world leader if we start this process now. When all the other States start talking about extending accrual accounting to include environmental resources, the ACT can say, "We started that 10 years ago". When we start to get a grip on the models, and a better picture of what ACT Government agencies are consuming and producing as waste, we may be able to extend these models to the non-government sector.

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