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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 10 Hansard (23 September) . . Page.. 3135 ..

MRS CARNELL (continuing):

I believe that it will also ultimately place the ACT on the world map as a jurisdiction with the most advanced and responsible environmental management. I commend the status paper to members and look forward to their feedback. I move:

That the Assembly takes note of the paper.

MS TUCKER (3.32): I would like to say a few things on this. I am very pleased that the Government has taken this issue on board. We look forward to reading the status paper and making sure that real changes are implemented in the ACT. We actually raised this issue initially when the Government was introducing its financial management reforms. At the time, our proposals for environmental accounting and broadening the role of the Auditor-General received a very lukewarm response. In fact, I have here a little article that was in the Sydney Morning Herald, where Mrs Carnell was actually quoted as saying that the whole idea was quite loopy. So, I am delighted to see how we have progressed the idea - it has gone to the Planning and Environment Committee, this status paper has been developed and we have recognition in this place that it is absolutely critical that we develop our concepts of measuring how we are working as a society.

Better accounting for our environmental assets is not a luxury; it is a necessity. The economic indicators we currently use are not an adequate reflection of human welfare or the state of the environment. While there is no doubt that economic growth rates have been useful in the past in documenting the rapid increase in material welfare, they are unable to measure economic and social realities. They cannot, for example, account for the value of untraded assets such as clean rivers, forests and clean air. They cannot acknowledge the value of items that are not traded, such as household production and voluntary work. They also say nothing about the level of equality in our society and the growing costs of unemployment and overwork.

Mr Speaker, it is indeed time for new indicators and new economic models which reflect contemporary realities. While, materially, our society may be offering better outcomes for some people in our community - more than ever before, in fact - there are very real social, economic and environmental costs from a continued narrow focus on economic growth as the sole measure of our progress as a society. Recent research by the Australia Institute aimed at developing an alternative measure to gross domestic product in Australia has found that continued economic growth in Australia is relying ever more heavily on the run-down of our stocks of built, social and natural capital.

According to a new measure of national wellbeing, the genuine progress indicator, since about 1980 the living conditions of Australians have not been improving and we are borrowing from the future to prevent our living standards from falling further. It highlighted the urgent need for a new accounting framework if we are to measure the true impact of public policies on national wellbeing, one that not only measures economic activity but also gives due attention to changes in social and environmental conditions that affect people's lives now and also into the future.

In recent years, fortunately, people have become more aware of the intricate relationship between the environment and economics and the need for integration as a means to achieve environmentally and socially sustainable developments. Sure, the environment receives greater attention than it did previously and we now have many more institutions

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