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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 10 Hansard (29 August) . . Page.. 3012 ..

MRS DUNNE (continuing):

I take the point that was made in estimates by officers from Environment ACT that if you put on a new ranger you have to put on a new vehicle-that there are extra bits and pieces that go with it. I think freeing up the hours of existing rangers so that they can spend more time out ranging than doing office work is a good approach, but let us be frank about what we are doing.

I believe that the Treasurer and the minister need to get straight what role volunteers in such groups as Landcare and Parkcare will play in the protection of our natural environment. We have seen instances of this problem. The Friends of Aranda Bushland were told recently that they couldn't go out and conduct a working bee because of an uncertainty about what insurance cover would be available to them.

Year in and year out we have stood in this place and spoken at public meetings extolling the virtues of Landcare and its associated organisations as a great experiment in social capital, of bringing the community together and doing things that the bureaucracy could not do. We would never have enough money to pay for what park carers and land carers do on a voluntary basis on their Saturdays and Sundays. But at the same time we are willing to let that go for want of a little insurance. I beg you, minister: do something about the insurance so that organisations like this are not left in a situation where they cannot go out and continue the fine work that they have been doing for 10 years or more. This is a matter of some importance and it needs to be resolved now.

As I said, Mr Wood's $1.5 million over three years in his package A sustainable bush capital into the new millennium sounds great. But I go back to the argument: what is sustainability? Does this government know? No, it doesn't.

We are seeing contradictory things from this government about what it wants to do with the environment. It downgraded its environment advisory structure by doing away with the Environment Advisory Committee. No longer does Environment ACT or the minister for the environment have an overarching advisory board. It has a whole lot of piecemeal advisory boards, which all do a good job, but there is no-one outside Environment ACT with an overarching brief looking at what the minister does and what the environment bureaucracy does, and this is a retrograde step.

At the same time, we have a piecemeal and really lukewarm approach to cutting energy consumption. We have seen in this place the minister for energy pooh-poohing any suggestion about making progress on renewable energy-trying to stymie debate on renewable energy, trying to stymie suggestions like that from Ms Dundas about putting on our electricity bills how much greenhouse gases we are using. Apparently, that is too difficult, that is too much, and that really doesn't amount to anything anyhow. Where is the commitment from this government to real energy cutbacks, to real reductions in energy use? Where is the real commitment to renewable energy? It is not there.

As I have said before, the solar hot water scheme is only middle-class welfare. Although this Assembly passed a motion calling on ACT Housing to start to implement the replacement of hot water systems with solar hot water systems in government housing, the people from ACT Housing who appeared before the Estimates Committee said that this was too difficult and that they are relying on past measures such as hot water tune-ups and the cavity filling. While these practices are good, they do not move forward from and capitalise on the strong base that existed under the previous government. The

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