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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 1 Hansard (8 December) . . Page.. 3951 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

It is not often that I get to put forward a proposal that has the support of the Federal Liberal Government, but I am happy to say today that the Greens got the idea for this Bill from the Federal Minister for the Environment, Senator Robert Hill. Members may recall that last year the Liberal Government put forward a new Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Bill in the Federal Parliament. That Bill was quite controversial in that it radically changed the Federal Government's approach to environment issues and devolved many Commonwealth environment powers to the States. In order to get the Bill passed through the Senate the Government reached agreement with the Australian Democrat senators, who put a number of amendments to the Bill. The Bill was finally passed in June of this year. The Bill was opposed by many environment groups, but some groups decided to back the Democrat amendments in the belief that getting some changes to the Bill was better than nothing.

This is not the place to go into detail about the problems with the Federal Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act. However, there was one amendment to the original Bill that was supported by all parties and environment groups. That was to section 516A, which required that the annual reports of Federal government departments, authorities and agencies include a statement on what they are doing to promote ecologically sustainable development, or ESD for short. Specifically, these organisations are required to report on five points: How their actions and administration of legislation accord with ESD; how their outputs contribute to ESD; what impact their activities have had on the environment; what measures they have taken to minimise impacts on the environment; and how they are reviewing and increasing the effectiveness of these measures.

My Bill basically copies section 516A and applies it to all ACT government departments, authorities and agencies. It also makes some consequential amendments to the Auditor-General Act to extend the existing powers of the Auditor-General to take into account ESD in his performance audits to include all government authorities.

This initiative had its genesis in the national strategy for ESD that was agreed to by federal, state and territory governments way back in 1992. In fact, there was an action agreed to in the strategy that said that program managers would implement, monitor and review the performance of policies and programs outlined in the ESD strategy in the context of annual reporting requirements. Unfortunately, the ESD strategy became a nice addition to various bookshelves around the country, rather than being actively implemented by government.

Last year the Federal Government asked the Productivity Commission to undertake a review of progress in the implementation of ESD by Commonwealth departments and agencies. The Productivity Commission produced a draft report early this year. I understand that a final report has been completed, but has not yet been released by the Government. Whilst the review looked at Commonwealth agencies, I believe that its general findings could be applied equally to other levels of government, including the ACT Government.

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