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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 7 Hansard (25 June) . . Page.. 2121 ..

Mr Wood: Would you ask your officers whether this is more common these days than it used to be?

MR KAINE: Mr Wood - through you, Mr Speaker - I agree that a lot of these signs need to be replaced, and they need to be replaced quickly; but Mr Corbell was talking earlier about priorities. Within the budget that is available, I presume that our public servants are addressing the question of replacing these signs. They would have a system of priorities. They replace them in accordance with some priority. Obviously, road safety signs will be replaced before information signs, and I imagine that they will all be replaced in time.

Ms Reilly: Don't you know whether they have a priority way of doing it?

MR KAINE: Another little whinge, Mr Speaker; another uninformed little screech from the Opposition.

Ms Reilly: No; in fact, it was an informed comment, Minister.

MR SPEAKER: No interjection is informed, Ms Reilly.

MR KAINE: I do not think any of the other comment coming from the Opposition deserves any mention. I noted Ms Horodny's concern about our waste management strategy. It is clearly in the interests of the community that our waste strategy of achieving virtually no waste within a reasonable period of time is a sensible strategy, and we are moving towards that. On the evidence, we have not moved as fast and as far as we would like to have done in the time that has elapsed already, but I would hope that there would be some increase in the momentum of this implementation strategy over the next few years and that we will be in a position of more likely fulfilling the strategy in the timescale than we appear to be at the moment. I do not think that the Government is unmindful of the situation. We did not develop the strategy for nothing. We developed that strategy because we intended to put it into place, and we will be moving to make sure that we go close.

MR HUMPHRIES (Attorney-General and Minister for the Environment, Land and Planning) (5.24): I want to respond to a few issues raised in the debate which touch on my area of responsibility. I will make a couple of comments about the general debate first. I think this year's budget has attracted less criticism, less informed criticism, than previous years', and, if you sat and listened to what some of the members in this place have been saying about it, it is not hard to see why. I nearly fell off my chair when I heard Ms Reilly a moment ago get stuck into my colleague Mr Kaine on the charge that he wilfully and knowingly went to the Estimates Committee of this Assembly without knowing that the white line marker was out of operation. Mr Speaker, Mr Kaine can join the lines of those Ministers who had to resign from their offices in disgrace and be sent to a sinecure in the Bahamas or somewhere because he did not know that the white line marker was not working on 24 June this year.

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