Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .

Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 8 Hansard (26 June) . . Page.. 2188 ..

MR MOORE (continuing):

I would like to thank the other members of the committee for their work on this committee. I extend a particular thankyou to the secretary to the committee, Mr Rod Power, who has always put in a fantastic effort, as has been the case with all the committee secretaries I have dealt with. In this case there was a wide range of issues before the Planning and Environment Committee. At no stage has Mr Power ever complained to me as chair of the committee about the workload or about the demands that are made on him but rather has worked very hard and often late into the night. In fact, last weekend he was in here with me working on this report and another report. Sometimes we underestimate the amount of effort in the support that we get from the staff who ensure that we are able to consider these issues in the kind of detail that we do. Mr Speaker, I commend the report to the Assembly.

MR KAINE (4.24): I will be quite brief on this. I think the chair has outlined the report comprehensively, but there are just a couple of matters that I would like to draw the Government's attention to. The first is that in this report there is a preface and that preface has been contributed to by all the members of the committee. I believe it is a quite general statement that we all subscribe to. The interesting thing about it is that at paragraph 3 it states:

The committee has carefully considered these key documents in reaching a number of conclusions ...

In fact, they were originally conclusions, but they have been converted into recommendations on the basis that the Government itself, we were told, intends to disseminate a discussion paper. Otherwise, this report - and the very structure of the report will show this - would have been a very good basis for a discussion paper because it includes all of the documents that we could identify as relating to this subject, including the Australian and New Zealand Guidelines for the Assessment and Management of Contaminated Sites issued in 1992, the strategic plan for contaminated sites management adopted in 1995, and so on up to and including the first report of the Watson scientific expert advisory group dated May of this year and extracts from the Auditor-General's report of May this year. The report brings together a number of documents that are relevant to an understanding of, and a discussion on, the broad subject.

In so far as the findings of the committee are concerned, I think it needs to be made pretty clear that the committee, by talking to a lot of people and allowing a lot of people who had an interest in doing so to come and talk to us, determined what the community out there really wants. What it wants can be summarised quite simply. If they are on a piece of land which is contaminated and which does not constitute a serious health hazard, they want their land cleaned up and they want a certificate that says that their land has been cleaned up. That is a fairly basic and understandable requirement. On the other hand, if their land is contaminated to the extent that it constitutes a serious health hazard, they want to move somewhere else and they want to be compensated for doing so. The Government, I think it is fair to say, has responded to those needs. For the moment there is a temporary hold because of an incidental matter. The Government, of course, has to resolve the question of how it goes about that and what it does in the future.

Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .