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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 7 Hansard (26 June) . . Page.. 2166 ..

MR WOOD (continuing):

Let me give you the background to how these things happen. The ACT department of finance is our Treasury. Every year - I guess it is still the case today - governments get from Treasury a list of options for raising revenue, reducing costs and a variety of things. Our Treasury does this just as the Department of Finance at the Federal level comes up with options. Sometimes they get leaked and we see sensational stories about what might happen. In fact, they are nothing but options presented to government. Our Treasury was always very emphatic about examining the prospects of putting a charge on entry to our nature parks.

Mr Humphries: Treasury forced you to put the provision in the Act, did it? Do not give me that, Bill.

MR WOOD: The ALP Government looked at a whole range of options over the period, and this was one of them. I fiercely resisted that, and the Labor Government was more than prepared to go along with my views. The views I expressed to my colleagues at that time were basically two. The first was that we should not impose a charge on Canberrans to see our natural resources that so many of us use. My colleagues and I had the very strong view that we should have ready access, without cost, to our natural resources. The second view to back that up was that it was not a workable proposal. In the end, this Government has come down with the one area where something might have been done, and that is Tidbinbilla. It is a sheer impossibility to impose charges on entry to all of our nature parks and to Namadgi. It is simply not feasible. That was a very good backup to my other argument.

Pressures continued, but we resisted those. I can say quite confidently that if the former Government had stayed in power and I had stayed as Minister that resistance would have continued, both from me and from that Government. It is a strange approach from Mr Humphries that he seeks justification from what he claims we did. The clear fact is that we never imposed a charge. I would like to see Mr Humphries come into this chamber and tell us where there is a sign saying "charge". That will occur only after he gets this Bill passed, if he does. We fiercely resisted charges.

I might add that I am not convinced by Mr Humphries's costing. A cost of $40,000 to build a booth and associated works is probably a reasonable figure, but then he talks about $35,000 in staff costs. That is quite an underestimation. In some of the figures I saw it was expected that if a gate were put at Tidbinbilla the cost of manning it would go close to the revenue derived from people going through. I doubt that the Minister is going to be able to have a gate operating from nine until five, or in summer from nine until six, seven or whatever time, seven days a week, for $35,000 in staff costs. It is a pretty optimistic figure. The plain fact is that the Labor Government resisted a charge and would not impose a charge. The record shows that we did not impose a charge, and I do not think any charge is justified.

MS HORODNY (11.20): I would like first to outline the Greens' stand on the issue of entry fees to national parks, Tidbinbilla in particular, because there has been some misrepresentation about our position. The first that we heard about the Government's plan for entry fees and upgrading Tidbinbilla was at the briefing given to us by officials just before the Minister made his announcement on 13 May. At that time we gave conditional support to the Government's proposal to charge fees for entry into the

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