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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 7 Hansard (21 June) . . Page.. 2376 ..

MR SMYTH (continuing):

a pilot program for the retrofitting of wall insulation to homes, a very important initiative to cut down on the personal expenditure of energy that contributes to greenhouse emissions. The third supports the distribution to the community of the Global Warming: Cool It booklet.

You can stand up here and glibly say to people, "No, they do not have a holistic approach. They do not do anything in a cross-government fashion. They are not really interested in the greenhouse issues." If you wish, I can continue reading, but I just might stop there.

The other interesting thing is that Mr Corbell also spoke about all this money we have to spend. I have to remind Mr Corbell that the reason that there is money to spend is that, over the last six years, this government has made sure that there is money available.

Mr Corbell raised, again, in a snide attack on public servants-and this is what we are used to, and these are the people that, according to Mr Berry, Labor will be supervising in October-the argument about whether or not we are spending money illegally on purchasing buses. Obviously we are not. We are not and he ought to be ashamed of himself. If Jon Stanhope had attended Mr Quinlan's course on spinal transplants, Mr Stanhope would actually tell Mr Corbell to come down and withdraw what he said.

No contracts have been entered into. Why? Because we do not have any money yet, Mr Speaker. Yes, inquiries were made. How do we know inquiries were made? Because we have the cost of the buses in the budget document. How did we get that figure? We asked some questions. But, no, there are no contracts. His suggestion that public servants had entered into any such contracts at all is actually an insult to those public servants. He should come down, he should withdraw, and he should apologise.

Mr Speaker, this is a very good budget. This is a very good budget because it continues the good work that has been done over the last six years by successive Liberal governments. It is the continuation of the work of making up for Labor's past errors. It is a budget that actually builds on financial sustainability for the ACT, which we have now achieved. And the great threat of October is that, in that grand Labor tradition, they will take us straight back into the red. (Extension of time granted.)

We are probably not quite there, but we are well on our way to achieving environmental sustainability for the ACT; not just with those items that the commissioner detailed and those I have listed in just the greenhouse section, but we have put in train measures that Mr Baker, the independent Commissioner for the Environment, tells us are pace-setting, on-top issues, significant environmental achievements and indicate significant environmental leadership nationally. This demonstrates our commitment to environmental sustainability.

The third arm is social sustainability. It means building a better place to live and generating social capital. What we have done in the last six years is to make up for the neglect and the inappropriate policies of Labor, and the squandering of opportunities. These are the people who flooded the land market to make up for their excesses. In desperate attempts, over several years, to balance their budgets, they sold off what Mr Corbell is always talking about as our most valuable asset-our land.

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