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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 07 Hansard (Tuesday, 29 June 2004) . . Page.. 2865 ..

The argument put by the government is that it is okay to do this because there were forestry settlements, but it is going to increase it significantly. We have already had some discussion of that in this place and I will not go further except to say that I think the government has failed to do that, and the Office of Sustainability needs to be brought into that to make sure that there is some kind of real impact assessment of this, taking into account the precautionary principle and the obvious fact that there is no way this government can commit to there never being greater expansion of development west of the Murrumbidgee which could follow from this.

If this government can use the excuse of the forestry settlements to have these larger villages, then future governments will be able to use these larger settlements as an excuse to have more or even greater, larger settlements. There was a social argument for replacing the houses of the forestry workers who lost their homes, and I acknowledge that, but I think the process is really flawed.

One other comment I would make is on tourism. The Greens certainly did amend the act that guides how tourism is managed and it encourages sustainability, but I do not think we have ever seen that really picked up. I recommend that the government—and the Office of Sustainability could do this as well, possibly—look at projects or programs such as Green Globe and try to bring in some kind of ESD framework to the conduct of tourism and become much more proactive in that regard.

People also talked about obesity and the relationship between health, education and sport, and so on. I add planning to that. Walkability is one of the key factors for the health of people in any community. If you have a planning system that supports walkability—and the government has acknowledged that—it needs to be brought out in debate if we are talking about the various aspects of how we administer our city, the health of our children and, in particular, obesity.

MRS DUNNE (12.26): Many aspects of the Chief Minister’s Department budget burrow into much of our lives in many ways. There is a sort of general co-ordinating approach in Chief Minister’s which is modelled on the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet model in the federal government. There is an argument for a strong co-ordinating role across departments. One of the things that I am starting to see members in the Estimates Committee express some concern about is a move away from that co-ordinating role into more program-type work. Ms Dundas talked about children and the family centres, and there seems to be a blurring of the role there as to whether this is a co-ordinating role or a program being run out of CMD. We need to have a clear vision of what CMD is doing. At the moment that vision is lacking. It will take the leadership of a chief minister to establish the policy advising co-ordinating role and ensure that we do not spend our time administering programs because there is enough to do in the policy advising and co-ordinating role.

I am concerned, for instance, and I will touch on this first, about the implementation of the non-urban study. It is a fairly unprecedented move for the Chief Minister to say, “I will take this role on myself and I will run it out of my department.” This is essentially an economic development and planning issue, and it should fall neatly into the role of the planning department. If the Chief Minister has concerns about the way the planning

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