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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 07 Hansard (Tuesday, 29 June 2004) . . Page.. 2863 ..

I think that was the quoted number or something like that—when new residential buildings are being provided and are being filled. So that was the discussion.

It then moved to population, and the journalist was asking the Chief Minister: what are we going to do; we do not have enough people and we need to see greater population growth. There was some rather light-hearted conversation about that being a problem. The irony of it was that I was going to the opening of this conference where extremely strong and well-informed presentations were going to occur about exactly these questions of population and the carrying capacity of regions. We are not different from the countries that were represented. We are dealing with the same resource constraints—obviously water in this environment—and we have to be prepared to take a careful look at questions of population and relate that to resource use. I note the comments from David Lindenmeyer on this question, which I would like to read for the record. He said:

We get pointless hand-wringing from our political leaders and in the ACT we hear this absurd set of discussions about Canberra’s growth without any thoughts as to what’s a sensible population size for the city.

We have all these silly plans that talk about people growing olives and developing other settlements miles out of town—it’s mindless! Olives, for Christ’s sake! They’re going to be one of the biggest horticulture time bombs—you only have to drive around the Adelaide Hills to see how they’ve taken over the place.

It is difficult for governments and parliaments to talk about population, but if we are serious about sustainability, it has to be one of the central aspects of our consideration. As I said before, that has to be linked to carrying capacity and questions such as water—looking at the demand management side of supply and how we recycle water and so on, and getting really serious about reducing the resource implications of our population.

Another issue for the Office of Sustainability is bushfire recovery. I have raised this a number of times. I note in estimates there was a recommendation about catchment management. The response from the government was that it was doing it. I point out—and I will quote David Lindenmeyer on this again too—that the Greens have serious concerns about the arguments that have been put up by the government to justify the planting of pines in catchment areas. I asked a question on notice on that as well. The answer to that is quite long, and I will not take up members’ time by reading it all because they can read it for themselves. I just want to point out that it is talking about providing a cost-effective land management strategy. I think all people will respect Mr Lindenmeyer’s comments as he is a very well respected scientist in the area. He goes on to say:

I remain unconvinced that pine plantation should be replanted in Canberra’s water catchments.

One of the big problems with pine plantations is that unlike native forests, the trees don’t regenerate … they are killed outright by fire and their removal has a huge impact on our water catchments and the quality of our water supply.

He talks about how to deal post-fire and says:

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