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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 4 Hansard (7 May) . . Page.. 1085 ..

MS HORODNY (continuing):

There is also the financial side of this issue that needs to be unravelled. If this building rubble were taken to Pialligo, there would be a charge to the Government of $4 a tonne for sorted brick and concrete and $14 a tonne for mixed rubble. The Government claims it is making a saving on the demolition costs by using the explosion method and sending the rubble to Fairbairn Park, but this is a false saving because it is depriving the recycling businesses in Canberra of the opportunity of gaining more work.

I would also like to know whether the motor sports clubs that use Fairbairn Park are paying any of the costs for transporting the rubble to their site and then forming the noise mounds. If they are not paying the full cost, then this is, in effect, a subsidy to the motor sports clubs, which should be required to pay for noise control works as part of the polluter-pays principle. Does this subsidy appear anywhere in the Government's budget released yesterday? The Chief Minister said yesterday that the building of these mounds would be subject to design and siting controls and implied that there was nothing to worry about, as the public would be able to comment on any development applications. It is a bit too late for that. As usual, the Government is following its "decision first and consultation later" approach to planning. The Government should have done a full examination of the environmental impacts of motor sport activity at Fairbairn Park before it decided to send all this building rubble there. My motion is intended to promote a more sensible approach to managing the waste produced by the Acton demolition than just dumping it at Fairbairn Park, and I commend this motion to the Assembly.

MR HUMPHRIES (Attorney-General and Minister for the Environment, Land and Planning) (4.54): The Government will be opposing this motion of Ms Horodny's. No-one doubts that Ms Horodny has a great commitment to recycling, but we can assume only that she has been badly advised by someone or she does not fully appreciate the implications of what her motion would mean, were it passed today in the Assembly. The alternative view, I suppose, is that she does understand the implications of the motion, in which case I would have to say that it is her judgment which has to be questioned.

I must say that I was very impressed by Ms Horodny's melodramatic use of the word "explosion". I had visions of a demolition contractor, dressed in a black cape and a mask, as all environmental villains are, and with the long beard - I forgot that - sneaking up on the building in the dead of night with one of those spherical bombs, with the fuse burning, and then lobbing it into the building. I am afraid that the implosion - it is not an explosion; it is an implosion - of the tower block and Sylvia Curley House will be much less dramatic than this. Indeed, the lack of sound and fury was a key consideration in the selection of tenders, and I will explain why in a moment.

Let us give Ms Horodny the benefit of the doubt and assume that she is not aware of what her motion would mean for the patients at the hospice. If we had to use conventional demolition, Ms Horodny, no doubt, would be at peace with the world; but she would be alone in that respect. Conventional demolition would mean the patients in the hospice would be able to enjoy more than another month of pneumatic drills, jackhammers and the heavy demolition equipment that you find on a conventional demolition site. Indeed, conventional demolition would add six weeks of noise to the demolition.

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