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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 09 Hansard (Tuesday, 17 August 2004) . . Page.. 3742 ..

“We will have the best of both worlds—a lively city which, at the same time, is environmentally responsible. Respect for the environment will influence everything in the planning process—from the type of building materials we use to the way we manage public transport.

“… I wholeheartedly support the concept of ‘green urbanism’.

“As we become a ‘green urban’ city—

What other sort of city can you have except an urban one—

it will show—visitors will recognise that we do things differently in Canberra, and that the environment is at the forefront of all our decisions.”

We certainly do things differently. We listened here to a litany from the Minister for Urban Services about all the wonderful things that the government does, all the money that it throws at things. But this is what this government always does. It always has measures for input. We are throwing X-million dollars of money at the problem, but we never measure the outcomes. The outcome, despite the buckets of money being thrown into it, is a pretty down-at-heel city.

At 5.00 pm, in accordance with standing order 34, the debate was interrupted. The motion for the adjournment of the Assembly having been put and negatived, the debate was resumed.

MRS DUNNE: We had Mr Wood’s litany, and you also opened the challenge, Mr Deputy Speaker, about issues in Ginninderra. I will raise a few. William Hovell Drive was recently duplicated but we did not manage to resurface all of it. So some of it is a 10-year-old bit of road that is pretty dodgy indeed. The Minister was extolling the virtues of what was done in Ginninderra Creek. The trouble is it was done under another environment minister—I think his name was Brendan Smyth. I think Mr Smyth might have done the funding for Hobart Place as well.

Let us not talk about Kaleen. When you go to the shops there people queue up to talk to you about the down-at-heel state of the suburb where the Chief Minister lives. They line up and say, “I know that he jogs somewhere but he must not jog here because he does not see the state of our paths. He does not see the fallen trees.” The government might have spent $50,000 on the park, but it has not fixed up the dead trees all around it. Sadly, when the Chief Minister spoke in May this year about green urbanism, that was the end of it. It has never got a guernsey since and I think he thought that no-one would notice. Maybe this is because the Chief Minister thinks that the environment is an issue he owns. He is wrong. He can say what he likes about it; he is wrong again. Maybe he thinks his friend and supporter Ms Tucker has given him the environment or sold it or at least lent it to him for a while.

But this is not an issue about the look of the city. It is not only an issue for people who might be characterised as greenies. You do not have to be a greenie to want to live in a green city, to like greenery and to be concerned with other green issues generally. Some of the people most concerned about our trees have been associated with the building industry, as have some of those most concerned with green issues more generally. Let us

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