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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 02 Hansard (Wednesday, 3 March 2004) . . Page.. 696 ..

Leave granted.

MRS DUNNE: I thank members. It is regrettable that we have come to a situation where we are as an Assembly throwing out consultation. We have just had the Minister for Planning say that it is not crucial or so time critical that we cannot have a think about it, and we have heard the Chief Minister say that he has reservations about the appropriateness of the public consultation. What we are doing is saying, “Before we take this step, let’s have some public consultation.” We do not have to hurry this today. The Minister for Planning has just said that. The problem is that we did not caucus with each other about this before we came in here to debate it. The Chief Minister had no idea what the Liberal Party’s views were on this because he did not pick up the phone and ask. I suppose it was remiss of me, too, in that I did not pick up the phone and ask him directly. But I did ask his office and, as at half past 10 this morning, I had no idea what the government were going to do on this. We were still working through our views, but we could have worked through our views collectively and perhaps come up with a better policy outcome than what appears to be going to happen here today.

The opposition’s amendment seeks to have some further investigation. There is no doubt that cats have an impact on bird life in places like Mulligans Flat. But Mr Corbell is also correct when he says that they are not the only thing that has an impact; there are issues in relation to invasive weeds and a whole range of other things that need to be addressed. There needs to be a better plan of management for Mulligans Flat. We do not currently bait for foxes and things like that within Mulligans Flat. We need to look at those sorts of issues, instead of rushing through this because Ms Tucker wants an outcome.

We have just heard that there is nothing time critical in this that could not wait until next week, the end of March, or probably until the end of May, to allow some consultation so that the community know what is being done. We are having a meeting tomorrow about the structure plan for Bonner. The community need to know not that we have made a decision necessarily but that we are thinking about it. We could have some input from the community as to whether one course of action or another is acceptable.

We are actually rushing this. We are throwing out consultation. The people here who are always saying that we do not do enough consultation are suddenly saying, “Well, there is enough consultation.” Is it because we have got the answer that we wanted? Really, I do not think that is how you go about consultation. You get consultation to find out what people are thinking and where people are going. If we did all the public consultation and the public said, “No, no, no, we don’t want a cat-free zone,” but as legislators we thought it was important that we did, we at least know where the community stand and what we need to do to take the community with us. But at the moment we do not know what the community think. We know what 10 people think, and a few people who called call-back radio. We do not know what the community think. We are making decisions here in a vacuum. We all have a feeling. We know that cats have in impact on bird life, but we do not know whether cat enclosures or cat exclusion zones will have a real impact on cats, and whether that will translate into improving the life expectancy of the birds in Mulligans Flat.

We need to work through these issues a bit and have a much better idea. If in the end we come back here and say, “We do not know,” we probably should adopt the precautionary

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