Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .

Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 4 Hansard (28 March) . . Page.. 979 ..

MR SMYTH (continuing):

attract vermin, snakes, whatever. Therefore, people tend not to compost that at home. A large number of Canberra residences now are flats or town houses, for which composting is not suitable. Their rubbish goes into the green bin. It is the green bin we need to attack in our next step towards no waste by 2010.

I believe the review suggested in recommendation 10 of the report is not necessary. We have had legal advice that indicates that such a collection is not a business activity as such, but it is quite legitimate to consider it as a normal function of government. Therefore, the Trade Practices Act does not have a role in this case.

It is very important that people understand that 52 per cent of food waste goes into the current domestic bins. That is about 23,000 tonnes a year going to landfill. It is not going into trash packs; it is going straight to landfill. We want to get it out.

Trash packs contain large amounts of bulky green waste, but it is often with a mixed load. Other things are thrown in trash packs, and therefore they have to be dumped at the tip face. The ability to recycle their contents is extremely limited. There seems to be little attempt by the trash pack businesses to sort and stream the waste. I would like to see that happen. We will talk with the proprietors of those firms to make sure that they understand exactly what it is we are doing. But you have to understand this is not an attack on the trash pack industry. We have clear objectives through the policy of no waste by 2010. We know the sort of waste that is going into the domestic bins and is therefore not collected by the trash pack services. This is a trial of a bio-bin. It is not a green-waste bin like that in Queanbeyan. That is something we have to do if we as a community are going to achieve the objective of no waste by 2010.

MR MOORE (Minister for Health and Community Care) (4.31): Mr Quinlan has been gracious enough to admit one mistake, so I think I had better draw his attention to another. He has not just made a mistake in this report but he has repeated a mistake that he made during the Christmas break, when he mixed up some figures. I refer Mr Quinlan to paragraph 6.2 on page 14 of the report, where he refers to Health and Community Care. Mr Quinlan suggests in this report, as he did in a press release about 10 weeks ago, that a $4.2m injection of funds is for price indexation. He has managed to turn it into a negative number. He has taken two separate government funding injections, one of about $5m and one of about $4m, and deducted one from the other.

A brief look at the details of the published budget papers reveals the true situation. The ACT government funding figure shown on the portfolio operating statement for 2000-2001 is $337.376m, an increase on last year's budget of $8.864m. The budget papers go on to help explain in detail the components of the increase. This makes Mr Quinlan's mistake, first in January and now in this report, even harder to excuse. The government payment for outputs figure is an increase on the latest estimated results for the end of year of $7.092m, and at the top of page 93 of the draft agency budget estimates document there are further details of the increase in government payments for outputs:

Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .