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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 13 Hansard (2 December) . . Page.. 4288 ..

MS TUCKER: I seek leave to comment on the paper.

Leave granted.

MS TUCKER: It seems that Mr Berry may have been at workshop 3; but I did not see him.

Mr Berry: I would not participate in the workshop.

MS TUCKER: That is right; of course. I forgot. You said that politicians should not be there. So, I will address that.

Mr Moore: Except to make his comments at the end.

MS TUCKER: Yes. It was all right to come in and bag the whole thing. There are a couple of things I would like to say here. First of all, this conference was an attempt to bring people together to talk about where we want to go as a community. When I summed up in my final speech, I also made comments about the fact that the group was not entirely representative and that the background papers that were developed outside the forum with members of the community must be integrated into any final document that came from it. I am not quite sure that that has happened yet. I cannot see it in here; but maybe it still will happen. But I was certainly prepared to be positive about bringing people together to talk about these issues.

On Saturday night, at a dinner, we had an address by David Suzuki. He has recently published a book called The Sacred Balance. In it he refers to the social and environmental problems that are facing us, particularly in light of the trend towards globalisation. Members may be aware that the World Trade Organisation is now moving further with the MAIs; so, we will actually end up with multinational companies having the right to move into any country with their business. This is a very frightening threat to the environment of the whole world. What David Suzuki was saying was that the only way we can actually counter this force, which does not take into account social or environmental issues, is to have thriving local sustainable communities. We have the opportunity in the ACT to make ourselves as sustainable as possible and to foster community development, so that we make our lives fulfilling and sustainable, both socially and environmentally. For that reason, I am always interested in supporting any kind of dialogue which is looking at these issues.

Mr Berry spent most of the last 10 minutes or so talking about one workshop out of six. The workshop he was talking about was the one on governance in the ACT. I did pop into that workshop for a little while. I have some difficulties with how it was facilitated, and I do not think the outcomes of it were necessarily representative of even the people there; but that is okay. It was a view. I was disappointed that Mrs Carnell seemed to take it as an indication that there did need to be a review. But, once again, we are prepared to have some input into that review that is occurring, because something is happening. We are thinking about how we can work better in this Assembly.

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