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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 05 Hansard (Friday, 14 May 2004) . . Page.. 1979 ..

did that? Not this Treasurer, not Mr Quinlan. Mr Humphries and Mrs Carnell did that. They laid the foundations. To his credit, Mr Quinlan, as shadow Treasurer, said during consideration of the last Humphries budget, “Gee, you’d have to love to be a Treasurer when things are as good as this.” Then at least he could admit that things were good, and things were good because of the hard work that had been done.

As the federal Treasurer said in his budget speech the other day, good economic management is not an accident. What we have seen here is some pretty accidental sloppiness on the part of the Labor government, who are spending hand-over-fist like a pack of drunken sailors. All the indicators are there and, as the Leader of the Opposition said, “Our alarm bells should be ringing.” But they are not ringing on the government side because the government is too busy spending. They cannot hear the alarm bells for the click of the cash registers.

Mr Deputy Speaker, as the Leader of the Opposition said, this is a budget of missed opportunities. It lacks leadership, it lacks inspiration. There is a failure to build on the strong foundations that were established for the Treasurer.

I would like to talk about the issues that are in my bailiwick relating to environment and planning in particular. I want to look at what has been built and what this government has failed to do. I will take a range of examples. When we are talking about strong foundations, we should look at this government’s failure on greenhouse. This territory signed up to a greenhouse strategy when Gary Humphries was minister for the environment. In 1997 we agreed to sign up to targets. The ACT was the first and is still, I think, the only jurisdiction in Australia to sign up to greenhouse targets.

A couple of weeks before the budget—this just sort of slipped into a news item—we saw the Minister for Environment, Mr Sustainability himself, saying, “Look, it’s really just too difficult to meet greenhouse targets. We are just going to revise them so we don’t have to meet them, so we don’t have to work as hard, so we don’t have to do anything.” This was at the same time as the outgoing Commissioner for the Environment was saying that we had to work harder to meet our targets, that there were eight recommendations from the independent review conducted last year that needed to be implemented so that we would come close to starting the process of meeting our targets. At the same time the Chief Minister was saying, “It’s just too hard. I might have to make a decision. I might have to do something that would cause someone to think that I wasn’t a nice bloke. I might have to require somebody to do something that was hard, and I’m too risk averse for that.”

We do have an initiative—and I will discuss the nature of the initiatives a little later—on page 160 of BP3. Under the heading “Implement 2004 Greenhouse Strategy”, the document states:

This initiative supports a community engagement and support programs aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions from the residential sector. The Energise Your Home Program will provide an energy efficiency audit service for existing houses and financial assistance with the introduction of approved energy efficiency improvements.

I am going to be almost a little unparliamentary here when I say that I wrote the word

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