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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 4 Hansard (28 March) . . Page.. 978 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

The committee is saying, "Here is the effort that you put into this, but as a matter of principle we are not going to take up any of your recommendations. We are not going to improve the budget, because we do not believe in principle that we should be asked to do that, even though the Assembly had already asked the committee to do that".

Mr Speaker, the tone of the report is also a little disappointing. The report is full of barbed comments. A very cynical tone is adopted throughout. I would assume that members of the community would expect to pick up these reports and see in them reasonably objective assessments of the matters that were put before the committees. I detect a very strong flavour of Mr Quinlan in this report. It reads like some of Mr Quinlan's speeches, with very Quinlanesque phrases and comments. That is fine for one of Mr Quinlan's speeches, but I am not sure it is appropriate for a report of an Assembly committee which is meant to be an objective assessment of the evidence placed before the committee. That is up to the committee, I suppose.

There are a number of issues in this report that I want to respond to in due course - the emergency services levy, the issues to do with other taxation measures and a whole host of other issues. It is a bit disappointing that the committee did not come back and put some of these issues to the Government for it to respond to so that it could have put some issues on the record in that respect. Had Mr Quinlan done so on the superannuation issue he has just raised, he might not have had to modify the statement he has made to the house today on this subject. This underscores what I think has been a disappointing exercise.

Mr Kaine might be right. Maybe there is not much value in the report that has been handed down if we have to go back to square one and make decisions for ourselves on what the budget should look like in May. That obviously was the intention of Labor members of this place, but it is not what we have tried to do in the spirit of the recommendations of the Select Committee on the Report of the Review of Governance of the ACT. We identified the need to make some changes, and we are disappointed that there is not a similar commitment on the part of those on the other side of the house.

MR SMYTH (Minister for Urban Services) (4.28): Mr Quinlan, in his recommendation 10, talks about the bio-bin. The recommendations states:

I would like to clear up the misconception that we are offering the green-waste system that Queanbeyan has recently introduced. That is not the intention. We see this as a bio-bin, and the trial will be tightly focused on what it is we are after. Half of the waste that goes into the green garbage bin that we all have at home is compostable. That is not collected by people who run trash pack services. There is no way for them to get into that bin to collect that trash. We want to split it at source. If we can get it out of that bin, it will not go to landfill. A large amount of that waste is meat and dairy products, which are normally unsuitable for composting at home. I am told that such waste may

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