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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 4 Hansard (2 April) . . Page.. 1306 ..

MRS DUNNE (continuing):

because they cannot keep their word with the people. They made commitments when they were in opposition because it is good, easy and cheap politics to make commitments that you do not have to keep.

I will not be part of an opposition which makes cheap commitments that it might never be able to keep in government. I understand many of the arguments put forward by Ms Tucker in her speech today and I congratulate Ms Tucker and the Watson community on their consistency in this regard over many years. When I came here in 1996, Ms Tucker and the Watson community were talking about the value of preserving and restoring this area and the Liberal Party was saying that it thought that a better use for it would be for residential purposes.

I still hold to that. It would be possible to maintain the trees in a residential environment. A lot of work was done by Environment ACT to go down that path and the previous Liberal government set aside the best areas in a park that is now known as Justice Robert Hope Park. That is where the best trees were and the best hope for maintaining those trees would be.

Most of what has been said here tonight has been about acknowledging that the understorey is pretty crook and outlining what we should do to set about restoring it. I think that it is a bad priority for governments and communities to pour their resources into restoring or re-establishing something in places where it does not exist when they could be pouring their resources into maintaining and making it better in places where it does exist.

Yes, the yellow box/red gum grassy woodland is an important and very threatened species. We understand that only 5 per cent of the pre-European distribution of this woodland type still exists. But in the ACT, that proportion is much higher; it is close to 15 per cent. In many ways, the ACT is doing very well in its attempts to maintain yellow box/red gum grassy woodlands, characterised by the introduction and constant maintenance review of action plan 10.

I would say to all of us here that, because we have such an onerous duty on us to maintain and preserve in the best possible ways those elements of yellow box/red gum grassy woodlands, we should be putting our efforts into the high quality bits in east O'Malley and places like that that are already in the Canberra Nature Park and already have resources dedicated to them so that our resources are put in to making sure that the good bits we have are better, rather than taking something that, in a sense, does not exist and trying to turn it into something that might exist one day.

MR STANHOPE (Chief Minister, Attorney-General, Minister for Community Affairs and Minister for the Environment) (9.12): Mr Speaker, I find myself concurring with Mrs Dunne in most of what she says. As members know, Environment ACT is preparing-indeed, it is just about to conclude-a lowland woodland conservation strategy. As has been indicated by members, and I do not think anybody will be surprised to know, the Environment ACT lowland woodland conservation strategy will not identify the trees at north Watson as part of the yellow box/red gum endangered ecological community.

Mr Smyth: But we told you that.

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