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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 6 Hansard (14 June) . . Page.. 1726 ..
MR CORBELL (continuing):
0.3%. The total of available Yellow Box/Red Gum grassy woodland left in south east Australia is 5%.
The question I put to you is, if you don't draw the line in the sand and demand the protection of areas with that level of significance, that degree of endangerment, when do you? When is it time to say, it is not a matter of juggling the traditional compromises you know, to try and achieve a win-win outcome, all of the things I regularly attempt to do in my daily working life.
In circumstances like this, you are talking about something that is so rare and of such value that no compromise is possible.
It seems to me that these are the very circumstances in which governments are required to show leadership. They are required to say to developers and proponents of schemes around their jurisdiction, "some places are simply not available to you".
If there was a planning decision to make that area available for housing, it has to be reversed.
That is why the Labor Party is moving this motion today. We believe it is important that this site is protected from development. We believe that, as a minimum, it should be incorporated into the urban open space network of the city. That is what this motion requests the government do. We believe that further work needs to be done on deciding exactly where the buffer zone should be between the end of this woodland area and the commencement of the grassland area below it. That is something we would be interested in pursuing further and have already indicated to the Watson Community Association, who have been one of the key proponents in this issue.
I ask Assembly members this morning to consider this site as part of an endangered ecological community. Degraded understorey, yes, but nevertheless an endangered forest type of which only 5 per cent remains of the pre-European existing coverage-5 per cent when the government itself says we want to try and achieve 15 per cent protection of this forest type in reserve.
The last point I will make is this: the New South Wales government has recently started a process of reconsidering its own criteria for protected forests to include forest types with a damaged or degraded understorey. It is not something the ACT government has indicated its preparedness to do to date.
Our decision in relation to Watson recognises that degraded understorey can be restored and that we can work better to protect these areas of endangered forest types. That is the purpose of the motion; that is the context in which the Labor Party has reached its decision. I urge members to support this motion today.
Debate interrupted in accordance with standing order 74 and the resumption of the debate made an order of the day for a later hour.
Sitting suspended from 12.30 to 2.30 pm
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