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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 8 Hansard (20 August) . . Page.. 2914 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

The fourth point was about volunteers being properly acknowledged. I do not have a problem with that. I thought that was happening, but if it has not happened enough I do not think that is controversial.

Then we get to the censure part of the motion. Regarding the first point, failing to heed the warnings in Mr Pratt's motion, I agree with other speakers: this motion was about arson and education in schools. Mr Pratt keeps saying it was about universal bushfire prevention, but what I see in Hansard is "Universal bushfire prevention and safety education in schools". The text of his speech was pretty well all about that so I do not really see why we should be bringing that into this debate at the moment. If you really want to get into punishment and vengeance in the Assembly, it might be more appropriate to censure everyone in the Assembly, except Ms Dundas, as they did not support my motion after the 2001 Christmas fires.

That motion called on the government to reassess land use options before replanting the pines. While I did not speak specifically about the fires in that motion, I was saying, "Hang on, can we just think about this?"It was an opportunity. Interestingly, people have said to me that they were hoping that motion would get up because they wanted to talk about the problem of pine plantations and fire. Of course, that did not get up and no-one in this place supported it, so there was not an opportunity.

I am not going to say that we are going to have to censure everyone in this place because I do not think it is a constructive use of time. The Liberals probably think this is a constructive use of time because they think it will increase their political profile, but I would have to say that there are a growing number of people in the ACT community who find their post-fires response increasingly offensive.

People are saying to me-not those who necessarily agree with my position, either-that they are concerned about the Greens' position on hazard reduction burns-probably because the Liberals keep telling them we do not support hazard reduction burns. However, they do say to me, "Even though we have a problem with the fact you do not support burning off", which I then have to correct, "we are really pleased with the way that you are trying to be constructive here and we are very disappointed with the Liberal opposition. They are upsetting a lot of people in the community."I think the Liberals do need to rethink their political strategy here.

The second point of the censure motion is about the implementation of recommendation 95 of the Recommendations of the debriefs of the 2001 Stromlo fire, which was about improved communication. To have a censure motion on the lack of implementation of the 95th recommendation-and I have up to 102 recommendations here-which was given low priority, is bizarre. I could point to many recommendations of extremely important reports that were never implemented by the Liberal or Labor governments, because of which failure I might be happy to support a censure motion against those parties. However, the 95th, which is given low priority, is really ridiculous. (Extension of time granted.)

In hindsight, of course, we can say this was actually important and it should have been a high priority, but there is no way that you can censure the government because it did not do that at the time. As I said, it was after the 2001 fires, when no-one in this place

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