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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 14 Hansard (10 December) . . Page.. 5083 ..

MS DUNDAS (continuing):

when there is an accessible and affordable bus service that can give them the same transport options. But at the moment we are just pushing ahead with paid parking without really looking at how we can fill the gaps with public transport.

The Minister for Planning has come down today and said, yet again, that his sustainable transport strategy will be out soon, but I think we need it a little bit more earlier than that. We do actually need to see more bus routes being put forward at the times when people want them and at the times when people need them. We nee a little bit of a rethink about how we are going to provide public transport services to Canberrans.

Another issue that keeps coming up is planning. People talk about the importance of government services and how infrastructure is put into the city, and I mean the broader city throughout our suburbs. Again it is disappointing that the community planning forums are something that we are still hearing will happen soon. The LAPACs were disbanded and nothing has been put forward to replace them as yet. The community has a lot of concern about how planning is going on in the territory. The development of the spatial plan is one way that the community has been brought in and been involved, but there still needs to be a look at what is going on at the suburban level.

The neighbourhood planning process has not yet moved out of inner north and inner south Canberra; it is not moving into the electorates of Ginninderra and Brindabella any time soon. I think that is a great shame. If we are serious about involving the community in planning, if we are really going to note the importance of government services, then we need to make moves in terms of community planning into the suburbs where people are actually living and allowing them to shape their home and their suburban surrounds.

Another government services that I think needs a refocus-we know it is important-is the collection of rubbish. We recently had the debate again about whether or not this government is set to reach the no waste target by 2010. We have seen technology rise to the challenge of meeting the no waste target since it was set a few years ago, but unfortunately we have seen this government put money and resources into building more holes to put rubbish in as opposed to coming up with new strategies to take waste out of the rubbish steam, actually recycle it and reuse it.

I repeat my calls to have a greater focus on the kerbside collection of compostible waste. We had the bio-bin trial in Chifley. Why haven't we again looked at where that went wrong, what needs to be done to fix it? Why aren't we supporting people to move compostible waste out of the waste stream and either back into their backyards or into another form of waste collection? It shouldn't just be going into the landfill out at Mugga Lane. I think that is a very important service that the government really needs to pick up on.

There are a whole lot of other issues that the public continue to raise with me. Affordable housing and special needs services in education are major issues that keep coming up, but I would like to talk about the community sector because when we are talking about the importance of government services we also need to recognise that where those government services don't work or where they fall down it is the community sector who steps up to fill in the gaps.

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