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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 14 Hansard (11 December) . . Page.. 5274 ..

MRS DUNNE (continuing):

At the last estimates committee hearing, the minister said that during the July break he was going to go on a fact-finding tour and look at some of this emerging technology. I note from the government travel reports that he did go on that fact-finding tour, yet we are still to hear of any policy on what do with putrescible waste. As the Minister for Urban Services delays, 2010 is ticking up fairly closely.

We have another publicity-seeking exercise by this government. I received an email invitation yesterday to a trial by the Office of Sustainability into revolutionary new fuel-efficient vehicles, touted with much fanfare by this government. Again, this government is behind the times. If the Chief Minister and Minister for Environment is concerned with the environment, all he needs to do is look in the car park: two of these vehicles have been in the car park for two years or more. Ms Dundas and Ms Tucker have been driving hybrid fuel-efficient vehicles for two years or more.

The Office of Sustainability wants to do a trial to see how these vehicles work. It should ask the manager of the fleet in the ACT Legislative Assembly. Go and ask Barry whether these vehicles are cost-efficient and whether they do the job. Then have your officials put them in their fleets. Let us not pussyfoot around with trials of one vehicle per agency: that is nine vehicles-a pathetic drop in the bucket, a pathetic approach to environmental management and environmental policy in this place.

We have a litany of failures from the previous minister for environment, such as the watering down of the environment advisory structure. That is simply because, as with all the things this government does, it needs to put on the final touch, to do away with anyone who was serving on the previous government for fear that they might be politically tainted. There was also the failed solar hot-water rebate. I do not know how many times the government has attempted to rejig, revamp, relaunch and republicise it. People are not getting the message.

If this government was really committed to reducing energy consumption in the ACT it would be doing something more than this pathetic middle-class welfare with the energy rebate and would not have got in the way of the Standing Committee on Planning and Environment and attempted to stop us inquiring into energy efficiency and renewables. It was a shameful day in this place when the minister for energy did everything he could to have the inquiry run off the rails.

We also had the fiasco of the Nettlefold Street trees and the constant concerns that the Commissioner for the Environment is ignored by this government. When you look through the annual reports of the Commissioner for the Environment, you will see time after time where issues have been raised with the government by the commissioner and those issues have been ignored. This is not how you provide for environmental management in this place.

The approach of this government to the environment is characterised by a lethal combination of ignorance and complacency in both the political and environmental arenas. This approach has the potential to do more to damage the environment than mining and logging and just about anything else short of carpet bombing.

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