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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 14 Hansard (12 December) . . Page.. 4883 ..

Proposed new clause 10A

MR MOORE (9.20): Mr Speaker, I move:

Page 3, line 27, after clause 10 insert the following clause:

"Environmental reports and Inquiries

10A. Section 18 of the Principal Act is amended by omitting paragraph (2)(a) and substituting the following paragraph:

`(a) prepare an Assessment; or'.".

This is the first of a series of amendments that propose that environmental reports and inquiries be prepared not by the proponent but by the department. It seems to me that conceptually we have a problem not only of independence but also of things being seen to be independent. When an environmental assessment is done it should be not only independent but also seen to be independent. Having a department at arm's length selecting who prepares the assessment is, I believe, a better way to operate than the way we currently do it, with the proponent choosing their own person and saying, "Can you please do an environmental assessment for me? I know that you are going to find everything against me, but that is okay. Go ahead and do it". They say that, and lo and behold it just does not happen.

There was criticism - in my judgment, some of it, although not all of it, quite unfair criticism - of the preliminary assessment at McKellar. It was seen to be partisan in the sense of the proponent being too close to the person who did the assessment. I know that it has been assessed by the department to make sure that that is not the case, but I think the issue needs to be rectified. I put up this amendment to the legislation because I think it is an effective way to do so.

MS McRAE (9.22): We will not be supporting this. Unlike pretty well every other one of the issues that the Government has raised in its legislation, this has come completely out of the blue, seemingly in reaction to the criticisms that were raised about the PER on McKellar, which I do not think were necessarily just, and has simply not had enough airing and discussion, even if you take 21 October as the starting date, except that that was well after most of the public discussion was had. I think we are rushing into something which will not necessarily solve the problem as Mr Moore sees it. In fact, it would create new problems much more difficult to solve than the ones he perceives.

With a great deal of the material from Stein, we have been dealing with perceptions and people's interpretations of events, actions and reports. This is another perception of the way that some reports have come out. Just because every single one of the PERs that have come to Mr Moore's attention happens to be in favour of the proponent, I do not think that that in pure, hard logic presents a case that therefore PERs that are paid for by proponents are in any way biased or likely to go the way of the proponents. It is just as

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