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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 8 Hansard (26 June) . . Page.. 2189 ..

MR KAINE (continuing):

We have recorded the fact that we believe that the officials concerned have dealt sensitively and compassionately with the issues and with the people involved and that the Government has responded appropriately. There is a longer-term question here. The Government now has to consider how it is going to deal with matters that remain outstanding today and perhaps future cases.

The Auditor-General - and we quoted some of his comments on page 53 - has made some comments about the fact that in his view, on some occasions, in some cases, the Government's response was too quick and therefore not properly thought through and that as a result there has been the expenditure of public money which in the opinion of the Auditor-General was unwarranted. He draws our attention to the fact that if the same processes continue to be followed then we are in danger of spending further public money unnecessarily. He draws that conclusion from a comparison with, for example, what is done in the State of New South Wales. His contention is - and this has not been tested by the committee yet, I must say - that the action by the Government in some cases has been perhaps a little precipitate and a little overgenerous. Those propositions put by the Auditor-General, however, I suspect, need to be subjected to some analysis.

I hope the Government finds the report a useful one in that it brings together all of the available documents that focus on the issue. It certainly highlights the concerns of the community and can point the way for the Government in resolving the issues more satisfactorily in the future. That is not a criticism of the Government. It may be that there is a fairer and a better way, and hopefully this report will help the Government come to some conclusions about whether there are better ways in which they can deal with the matter in the future. As the chair did, I commend the report to the Assembly and to the Government.

MS McRAE (4.29): Mr Speaker, I came into this inquiry more or less halfway through when I joined the committee in late March. I want to begin by putting on record how impressed I was with the bureaucrats who had been dealing with the issue of contaminated sites. They were dealing with a complete unknown. Nobody had ever dealt with contaminated sites in the ACT before. When I came into the debate in March, they were working with the experience that they had gained from the management of Theodore, where clearly some things had not worked out quite as smoothly as they would have liked. I was very impressed with their level of concern for directly informing each of the residents affected rather than information being conveyed second- and third-hand in an hysterical and misinformed way. From there on, they have developed their base of knowledge and their capacity to deal with the issue. I have a great deal of confidence that we have a group of people who are sincerely and deeply concerned about the impact of contamination on people in the ACT.

It was against that background that I was shocked by the Minister's action when he peremptorily withdrew the offers that had been made to the people in Watson when it was discovered that perhaps there was a natural arsenic site in Watson as well as the one that had been created by the sheep dip. I thought it showed a great level of insensitivity

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