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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 07 Hansard (Tuesday, 29 June 2004) . . Page.. 2959 ..

MR SPEAKER: Order! Chief Minister, restrain yourself. Mrs Dunne has the floor. If this continues, I will end up going to the position of naming people and all that sort of business and I do not think it leads us anywhere. Mrs Dunne, please proceed. If you direct your comments through the chair that would probably be helpful too.

MRS DUNNE: One of the constant themes is that the people of the ACT feel that they are not getting very much value for money when it comes to the nuts and bolts—footpaths, graffiti and general clean-up. On roadsides are car bodies and road kill is left for days at a time. When I was last involved with Urban Services, there was a process for picking up road kill as soon as possible. There are kangaroo and fox corpses on William Hovell Drive and elsewhere that have been there for weeks. Urban Services is not picking them up. It is not a good look. It offends some people and distresses others.

Road kill not being picked up raises an animal welfare issue. This is especially so with kangaroos that have been hit by cars—whether anyone has checked for a joey in the pouch and whether anything has been done about a joey which may still be alive. It is just another instance of not meeting the requirements of the people of the ACT.

We have a range of initiatives set out in the budget, some of which have been addressed by the Estimates Committee. I will just dwell on a few of them. I was pleased to see the response from the government to the Estimates Committee report. The Estimates Committee had suggested that the government might look at getting some economies of scale out of running together both the water audit, under “Think water, act water”, and the energy audit, under the energise your home program. The government has at least been courteous enough to say that there may be some merit in that. I commend the idea to the government for further exploration.

There are other models of energy and water audits such as the one run by COOOL communities. There are crossovers and synergies and it would be useful for us to get the most bang for our buck by ensuring that, if we are visiting someone at home to talk about, say, water efficiency and we see a glaring energy efficiency issue, we could address that for the benefit of not just the individual but the whole community.

The greenhouse initiative, energise your home, is good in principle. My concern is that it is a pathetically small sum of money. It boils down to basically $1 per house, per person, per year or about $3 per household per year. At that rate, it will take us a very long time to improve the energy efficiency of households in the ACT. We had a long discussion in this place last week about addressing greenhouse strategy. The government said that it is an awfully difficult thing to do—and it is if you are only prepared to spend $300,000 per year for the next four years because we will not make the progress. We cannot hang our hats on a simple $300,000 program and hope that that will improve the situation.

Under Urban Services we have a range of issues. We have the issue of the international arboretum. A number of people in this chamber are of the view that, whilst not necessarily disagreeing with the overall principle establishing the international arboretum, $10 million on that project at this stage of our bushfire recovery may not be the best way to spend our money, considering, for instance, that there is a large amount of fence building to be done. The weed problem is enormous and will get worse, especially if the drought continues, and we should be considering spending more money

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