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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 14 Hansard (9 December) . . Page.. 4745 ..

MS HORODNY (continuing):

governments at both Territory and Commonwealth level - to improve our natural areas and our waterways and to eliminate those sorts of invasive plants. On the other hand, some nurseries continue to sell - I know that they do, because I have monitored what nurseries around Canberra are selling at the moment - those very invasive weeds, including willows, box elders, cotoneaster and various species like those, which continue to be a hazard to Canberra's nature parks. So, on the one hand, groups are working to get rid of those plants and, on the other hand, other people are actually putting them into their gardens and contributing to this very major problem.

Once again, I believe that it is important with an issue like this that we do have carrots and sticks - that we do have voluntary work going on and liaison and discussion with nurseries about the benefits of not selling those plants, but that we have in place some legislation that actually prevents certain of the worst of the invasive plants from being sold.

MR HUMPHRIES (Attorney-General and Minister for the Environment, Land and Planning) (3.45): Mr Speaker, I would like to respond briefly to a couple of things in this debate. I want to emphasise to Ms Horodny that the Government is not saying that it is not prepared to move to ban the sale of invasive plant weeds from ACT nurseries. It is simply saying that, at the moment, the tactic for dealing with this problem is to work with the weeds officer of the Conservation Council to develop a community education program and to see how effective this is in restricting people's use of those weeds.

Again, I come back to what I was saying in question time about bringing the community along with us. If we start to ban the sale of certain plants which some in the community view as desirable, people will simply go across the border and buy them there. To make a ban effective, we are going to have to somehow regulate people's rights to plant plants in their gardens. It is just not going to be a successful strategy overall. We much prefer an education approach. That is what the weeds officer is partly employed to do. We look forward to working with that officer to try to achieve our goals about invasive plant weeds in that way. I do not rule out the possibility of some stronger action in the future; but I hope that Ms Horodny can see that it is important to try another tactic first, before we go to the fairly drastic step of trying to regulate who may buy what in what nursery.

On the cost of asking questions of government, in the Estimates Committee, a very large series of questions was asked of a large number of areas of government. Reference was made to it in recommendation 5, I think, or before that point, implying that questions should have been answered more promptly than they were. I want to emphasise what appears in the Government response in that respect. The cost of answering that series of questions alone - that is, gathering the information and providing it to the Estimates Committee -was in the vicinity of $100,000. Members should be aware that, when they ask a question, they are calling on the public purse to meet the cost of that, and that cost can sometimes be extremely great. It cost $100,000 for one set of questions in the Estimates Committee. If we add all the questions that are asked by the Estimates Committee - indeed, all the questions that are asked in this place, either on notice or without notice - the cost is very great.

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