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

Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 7 Hansard (29 June) . . Page.. 2319 ..

MR CORBELL (continuing):

Well, the perception may be that this is just some public-private debate, but it is deeper than that. It is about accountability, transparency and recognising that there are certain functions that must be undertaken by government, if they are to remain accountable and open to the community. The administration of our land cannot be anything else but one of those core functions. We have seen the transfer of leasehold administration away from our planning agency into the department of treasury. PALM has lost that expertise and that is a sad thing. The community is poorer for it, and accountability in planning administration is greatly diminished.

I would now like to move to the area of Environment ACT. Environment ACT remains an issue of considerable concern to many environment groups in the Canberra community. The government's serious commitment to funding and effectively implementing the many plans and strategies it prepares is under serious question. Despite the minister's words, that deep discontent remains in the community.

This government releases many plans of management, many strategic documents, many action plans and all sorts of other wonderful and exciting sounding documents. But does it have the funding to implement them? I point the minister to a unanimous recommendation of the Standing Committee on Planning and Urban Services, when it investigated the issue of the management plan for Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve. In its recommendations on that management plan, the Planning and Urban Services Committee said it seriously questioned the level of resourcing currently available to management at Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve, and it recommended that additional resourcing be provided to ensure that the management plan was properly implemented.

Equally, when the Planning and Urban Services Committee considered the draft management plan for Canberra Nature Park, again, it found that, without additional resourcing to Canberra Nature Park to allow its strategy to be properly implemented, the management plan was not worth the paper it was written on. Those were the two very clear messages that have come from the Planning and Urban Services Committee over the past 18 months to two years. Has the government seriously, and I say seriously, responded to those recommendations? The answer is no.

There have been continued reductions in staffing in Environment ACT, and the capacity of policy officers to do the work needed, and to focus their time and effort on the important strategies that the government is putting together, is seriously hampered because there are so few of them. The difficulty that this Assembly, and people in the community, have is that the level of detail provided in the budget papers is seriously inadequate when it comes to being able to properly assess the government's funding priorities and where that funding goes. There have been some steps this year to try to rectify this, but the papers are still not adequate.

That is why the Select Committee on Estimates, which I chaired this year, has recommended that the Planning and Urban Services Committee undertakes a detailed inquiry into the adequacy of funding for the provision of environment and nature conservation services in the ACT. This is in direct response to the continuing concern from well-respected nature conservation and environment organisations in the ACT. This includes organisations such as the National Parks Association, the Conservation Council of the South East Region and Canberra, and people in Landcare groups, Parkcare groups and many other organisations. This is not just some rabble fringe that the minister can

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