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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 8 Hansard (26 August) . . Page.. 2564 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

(ii) the Minister has, in writing, specified a facility outside the Territory as being suitable;

for the reuse or recycling of materials of the kind described in the plan - the plan stipulates that the materials will be disposed of, where practicable, at such a facility; and

(b) the plan satisfies any other prescribed requirements.'; and".

Just to explain that amendment, part of this Bill reinstates in the Building Act 1972 those provisions relating to waste management plans which were inserted in the Act by the Building (Amendment ) Act 1998. That was my Bill which set up a requirement for builders to provide a waste management plan with development applications that involved demolition or substantial modification of buildings. Until then, much building waste was just ending up in landfill, both in the ACT and in tips in New South Wales, when a lot of it could have been recycled. That Bill was supported unanimously in the Assembly as an important measure to reduce waste.

However, the provisions of my Bill were inadvertently overridden by the passage on the next day of the Building (Amendment) Bill (No. 2) 1998 which set up the new system of private certification of building approvals. That later Bill substituted sections amended by my Bill with whole new sections, and somehow no-one in the bureaucracy noticed that at the time. Since then I have asked the Minister on a number of occasions to fix up this problem, and I am glad that this is finally occurring in this Bill.

However, the proposed new subsection 34(3A) does not have the same intent as the previous equivalent subsection 33(1A) inserted by the Building (Amendment) Act 1998. The previous subsection 33(1A) stated that a waste management plan is adequate if the plan stipulated that waste materials were disposed of at a facility for recycling of materials whereas the new subsection 34(3A) only refers to a facility for disposal of materials. These words have different meanings, and if the current wording was accepted then a waste management plan need only specify that the waste was to be disposed in a landfill to be regarded as adequate. This was not the intention of the Building (Amendment) Act 1998 which had the objective of encouraging as much building waste to be recycled as practicable. This amendment therefore omits the current wording of proposed subsection 34(3A) in the Bill and substitutes the original wording from the Building (Amendment) Act 1998, with a slight modification to include reuse facility as well as recycling facility

I thank members for their support for this amendment.

Amendment agreed to.

Bill, as a whole, as amended, agreed to.

Bill, as amended, agreed to.

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