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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 2 Hansard (21 February) . . Page.. 502 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

to the conclusion that you should not be investing such a huge amount of public money in building another freeway; it is entirely inconsistent.

I am asking Mr Corbell to work with the election promise he made about sustainability. That is why I have moved an amendment which is basically saying that we should not build either option and that we should get serious about looking at alternative ways of moving people around this city, of reducing the need for people to move around this city by putting employment in Gungahlin and of upgrading existing roads in the meantime.

The western alignment would have a greater impact on the AIS and access to Bruce stadium than the eastern alignment, but the eastern alignment would have a greater impact on bushland on Bruce and O'Connor ridges than the western alignment. The Liberals seem to think that the AIS and its car park are more important than the bushland. I think that the bushland has its own inherent value and value to ACT residents that must be respected.

Mr Pratt might be interested to know that, during the campaign for the ridge, there were athletes vocally asking publicly for the western option, not the eastern option, because, as he may be aware, lots of athletes train in the bush and run through the bush and that is where they are doing their training. They came out asking that the eastern option not be progressed. Some of those athletes were vocal in public, but then the whole thing suddenly became quiet. We have known always the official line of the AIS, which has been made been clear through submissions and so on, but many of the people doing the work, the athletes, would not be supportive of what Mr Pratt is doing today.

The raising of concerns by the AIS highlights that the issue is not over for Labor. Mr Corbell claims that he is working with the AIS and that he will try to minimise the environmental and social impact of that freeway. I think it is really important to hold the Labor Party to account for the double standards or inconsistency in its election platform. For that matter, the Democrats should be as well. It is entirely inconsistent to support the building of a freeway, as I said, when you claim to have a commitment to ecological sustainability. We will not be going forward at all in this city by building this freeway. We know that the increase in greenhouse emissions in the ACT is the result of transport issues and we are not going to change that unless we get serious about challenging the use of private cars on the roads as the main way for people to move around the city.

I think it is really important that I make that point once again in this debate. I think the government is being hypocritical in starting this work of building a freeway, as I said in question time, at the same time as it claims that it is going to do a proper environmental impact assessment of the road. Mr Corbell said at question time that he did see it as a possibility that a good environmental impact assessment could rule out certain options. I am afraid that there is little credibility in that statement as he is forging ahead with his so-called election promise, even though, as I have pointed out already, the election promise is inconsistent with other election promises and therefore its credibility needs to be challenged or he needs to pull back from the election promise about the Labor Party understanding the importance of a commitment to ecologically sustainable development in our city.

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