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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 5 Hansard (14 May) . . Page.. 1426 ..

MR KAINE (continuing):

I put these statistics before the Assembly because the Greens, and others, often tend to forget important things like jobs and attracting business to the ACT, in their single-minded pursuit of environmental concerns, real or imagined. As I said, Totalcare is a commercial business operation. It does employ people, it does make a profit, and it provides a service in terms of waste disposal - waste which we would otherwise have to ship out of the Territory to be destroyed somewhere else. In their quest for environmental purity, do the Greens really want to see businesses lost or jobs lost? Do they really want to see us have to ship our undesirable waste somewhere else for disposal? That is what would happen if Totalcare were forced to reject safe and legitimate business on the basis of some kind of scare campaign, and we have seen that in the past.

Others, including Mr Osborne, have suggested that we replace the Totalcare incinerator, which is only six years old, with what is known as a plasma electric waste converter, at a price, he suggests, of about $1m. Both Totalcare and the Government are looking at this technology. It is very early in that process, but I can tell you that there are a lot of high hurdles to jump before we ever go to such a technology. My information is that the all-up cost would be more like $2m, or even $3m, rather than the $1m that Mr Osborne has suggested, because the unit would need to be large enough to take the entire throughput of the current incinerator. Otherwise, you would have two incinerators, both being half used. An expensive facility such as this can be operated successfully only by maximising the volume of waste treated. That is why we turned Totalcare into a commercial operation in the first place; they had a huge facility out there that was not being fully used and was costing the taxpayer heaps.

Plasma electric waste converters are capable of processing all kinds of waste, including highly toxic chemicals such as polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, and chlorinated pesticides that are not, and never have been, handled by Totalcare; so why would we need such a system? While it sounds very nice to advocate installing the latest high-technology waste disposal equipment, to make such a facility viable Totalcare might well have to expand its waste disposal business to include scheduled wastes. I do not think this is anything that this Government or the people of the Territory would want. The alternative would be for the Government to go ahead and spend the money, put it in place and go back to where we were 10 years ago; that is, subsidising a waste disposal unit that is beyond the requirements of the Territory, and again costing the taxpayers a bundle. Neither of these options is attractive. The reasons are perhaps obvious.

While we expect Totalcare to operate on a fully commercial basis, turning Canberra into a centre for disposing of the full range of wastes, including the scheduled wastes that Totalcare has not previously processed, is not the sort of strategic direction that this Government has in mind. We would prefer to see the ACT investment dollar put into high-technology industries that make the most of our intellectual capital. As for subsidising an excess capacity, as I said, this is the sort of thing that the Commonwealth used to do back in the 1960s and 1970s and for which, to some degree, we are still picking up the tab; so why would we want to make that tab even bigger?

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