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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 6 Hansard (25 May) . . Page.. 1819 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

Within the government's social capital initiative there is no extra support for all the volunteer effort that goes into protecting the local environment by landcare, parkcare and other conservation groups which often are doing work that government employees used to do.

This government makes much of its environmental initiatives, such as its setting of a greenhouse gas reduction target and its completion of action plans for endangered species, but it is quite clear that the government has no real understanding of or commitment to ecologically sustainable development in the sense of integrating environmental considerations into its decision-making. Its environmental efforts so far have been tokenistic relative to the government's wholesale commitment to private enterprise and economic rationalism.

The classic example of that is the government's announcement that it will spend $130 million over five years on major road construction. The government calls it a traffic jam plan, which is really what it is: it is just a plan to create more traffic jams. The experience in other cities is that new roads or road expansions just end up becoming congested and the pressure builds up for even more roads in a never-ending cycle. The government shows no concern that this plan will just increase the car dependency of Canberra residents and decrease the chance of ACTION ever being able to match the relative attractiveness of private motor vehicle travel.

The government shows no understanding of what is required to create an environmentally sustainable transport system in Canberra. The government has ignored the fact that there were two major elements of Canberra's transport system when the plan for Canberra was set in the 1960s and 1970s. One was the network of arterial roads and the other was the intertown public transport corridors directly linking the town centres so that bus travel could be given priority over cars on these routes. The government has proceeded with the roads, but the intertown public transport corridors have languished on the plans. A few sections of bus-only lanes have been built, but there has been no overall strategy to complete the corridors. If the government is really serious about addressing the transport needs of Gungahlin residents, it should have included in this budget the construction of bus priority lanes from Civic to Gungahlin and abolished ACTION's discriminatory zonal fare structure that puts Gungahlin in a different zone from central Canberra.

In the area of promoting economic growth in the ACT, we are seeing the government push for private sector development at whatever the cost, without any real consideration of the ecological sustainability of such development or even its contribution to social capital. The ACT budget has shown up the huge-$8 million-gift that the government has given to Impulse Airlines, dwarfing just about all the other initiatives in the budget, even the $675,000 allocated to other businesses under the business incentive scheme. When you compare that with the absolute refusal of Mr Humphries even to acknowledge the hardships being experienced by the community legal services, you do feel very concerned about the government's claims of a commitment to social justice or social capital, as the government calls it. I just hope that it ends up being a good investment.

Business incentive scheme funds have already been allocated to Telstra, Ansett and Raytheon-very large companies that hardly need the money. Raytheon is a huge multinational company. If we are going to be promoting business, we should be helping

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