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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 07 Hansard (Tuesday, 29 June 2004) . . Page.. 2862 ..

The review recommendations considered the hours of work of the Commissioner and the resourcing of the Commissioner’s office. The Government will be affording the new Commissioner … an opportunity to review the Government’s preliminary findings and provide input before all aspects of the review are finalised.

The input would probably be broader than just on the resources. The points the Greens think are very important are that the independence of the Commissioner for the Environment is maintained and that the independence of reporting is defined. I understand this year there will be some kind of reporting from the Office of Sustainability as well. A report on sustainability is an adjunct to the general report on the state of the environment. We need to see that that reporting is recognised as absolutely fundamental if we want to have an independent voice to represent the state of the environment. I stress again the importance of the independence of reporting.

I believe the Office of Sustainability could have a much greater function in integrating services across government agencies. That has been raised in discussion this morning by a number of members. That is where the Office of Sustainability could play a key role. The difficulties of integration of services come up in every document, whether it is an estimates report, an annual report or a committee inquiry report. This is a problem. It also is recognised as a problem for governments by independent commentators and academics. So, if we have an Office of Sustainability in the Chief Minister’s Office, which is an overarching unit, even though it is within government, arguably there is a really good opportunity for that office to deal with the interrelationship between the various agencies.

An interesting example of that was given in the estimates hearings. We had a discussion regarding the provision of new curtains for tenants at Currong Flats. We were told that the tenants had chosen their curtains and that they had chosen vertical blinds with pelmets. I asked was there any input from Environment ACT. That was taken as a question on notice and the answer was:

Environment ACT was not consulted by ACT Housing about the provision of these curtains. Individual tenants were able to seek advice from the government’s home energy advisory service on ways of improving the energy efficiency of their dwelling.

If the government is committed to sustainability, that is not good enough. You would want to see that the work in housing was fully informed by the understanding of energy efficiency that exists in Environment ACT. This would be useful not only for the environment but also for the tenants who were going to have to pay the energy bills. That is just one small example, but there are many more.

Another important issue—and once again this is a general comment I would make about the government’s understanding of sustainability—last night I was driving from here to the Asian women parliamentarians and ministers conference on population development and reproductive health. It was ironic because in the car I heard an interview with Jon Stanhope by Rod Quinn on ABC about the fact that ABS had shown that the population of the ACT had increased by 34 people. The government was challenging the methodology because it was rather odd that there was a growth of only 34 people—

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