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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 14 Hansard (9 December) . . Page.. 4744 ..

MS McRAE (continuing):

So, I think that that lends itself to some quite thoughtful further scrutiny by members on both sides and the crossbenchers, of course, next year. What may appear as a trawling exercise, as is noted by the Government, is perhaps something of extreme use; but perhaps it is time that the committee itself paid a bit more attention to it. I know that, over the three years, I have vacillated between very carefully looking at every question that was put forward and putting it to the whole of the committee, and simply allowing any member to put forward any question that they wanted to put forward.

I am grateful that the Government has looked in detail at not only the actual recommendations but also some of the paragraphs. With this report, as in the past, in the body of the text there have been suggestions and ideas rather than straight recommendations - all of which are, of course, intended to improve the workings of government and to improve the workings of the Assembly in total. As I say, next year, I guess that we will look at all the reports that have been put together over these three years and, when we come to the Estimates Committee again, we will try to make sure that both sides take that on board.

Finally, may I reiterate the importance of the review of the nature of the Estimates Committee review, the importance of it and the importance of the Administration and Procedure Committee taking it on as a matter of urgency early in the life of the new Assembly. With the advent of accrual accounting, the nature of financial information presentation, the nature of annual reports and the nature of information available to members have changed radically from when we had cash accounting procedures. Perhaps it is time that the nature of the Estimates Committee scrutiny changed in accordance with those requirements. I look forward to reading the responses in more detail and being better informed when I am back here next year, perhaps in a different capacity.

MS HORODNY (3.42): Mr Speaker, I would like to make a quick comment about Mrs Carnell's response to this report. I am very disappointed that Mrs Carnell has said that the Government does not support the recommendation to ban from sale certain invasive weeds in the ACT and that the Government believes that the weeds officer, who is currently employed by the Conservation Council under a government grant, will actually be able to solve the problems purely by working with voluntary compliance.

I believe that this is a very important issue. It is about environmental degradation. It is obviously also about rural properties in the ACT and the huge cost to those communities of dealing with invasive weeds. I do believe that working purely on a voluntary basis to liaise with nurseries and ask nurseries to not sell certain plants or certain trees which are invasive is simply one part of the solution. I believe that another really important part of the solution to this very important and very costly problem - it is a very expensive problem that we are dealing with here - is to ban certain invasive weeds from sale here in the ACT.

We already have a huge problem in our waterways with certain willows, which have completely disrupted the ecology of our waterways. Landcare groups are at present working very hard - and at great cost to themselves, in terms of their time, their own finances and their own energy, as well as with funding that they are receiving from

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