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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 07 Hansard (Tuesday, 29 June 2004) . . Page.. 2960 ..

on general land management than spending an inordinately large amount of money on planting a relatively small area of land.

We do wonder whether we are getting value for money when we compare the expenditure on the international arboretum over four years with some of the planting expenditure in ACT forests across the river where, for smaller amounts of money, larger areas of land are being replanted. I know that planning has to go into this, but I wonder whether the people of the ACT are going to end up with a resource that is materially superior to a forest planted elsewhere. We have to question whether this is the best way to spend our money.

Another recommendation of the Estimates Committee report was to establish a more appropriate catchment management structure. At one stage in the Estimates Committee we did consider the words “catchment management authority”. Some members had some concerns with that, which I understand, because it is not really the place of an Estimates Committee to recommend to government that they establish an authority, with all the legislation and formality that go with it. On the basis that we could not find better words, we made a more general recommendation.

I note that the government has basically palmed that off to one side, saying, “We have appointed two people to do some work.” That is good, as far as it goes, but appointing two people to do some work and having the odd meeting with Bob Carr from time to time does not address the issues, especially the cross-border issues of catchment management.

MR SPEAKER: The member’s time has expired.

MRS DUNNE: I will take my extra 10 minutes, Mr Speaker. A forest ecologist is a good enough initiative and a good enough start, but the complex issues of dealing with catchment management, particularly in the Googong catchment, which is outside our borders but which we have a proprietary legislative right to, have not really received enough attention from successive governments and are certainly not receiving enough attention from this government.

I move on to NOWaste by 2010. The NOWaste by 2010 initiative is falling behind and is an issue of considerable concern to members of the community. I have had representations from people—Ms Tucker also raised this during the Estimates Committee hearings—especially those living in multiunit developments, who do not have appropriate access to recycling facilities. It seems to be becoming increasingly difficult for people who do not live in freestanding accommodation to get access to such services.

This is going to be an increasing problem as there is an increasing tendency for people to live in multiunit developments. This is something that the government must address. It must find ways to ensure that people who live in multiunit developments can recycle their paper, tins and bottles.

Also, we have to address what seems to be an intractable problem for this government—that of biowaste. We have not seen any progress on the issue of biowaste. It really has gone into the too-hard basket. While we have this government and this Minister for

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