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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 09 Hansard (Wednesday, 18 August 2004) . . Page.. 3869 ..

The bill requires that all clearing of over 0.2 hectares of native vegetation be approved, under the Land Act, only when the Conservator of Flora and Fauna has approved the clearing and it is subject to a vegetation management plan. The proposed scheme would entail a significant workload on a busy administration. It would be resource intensive in staff, costs and timing. Before an approval to clear native vegetation could be given, the conservator must consult with and consider the views of the Flora and Fauna Committee about the draft plan. This vegetation management plan must set out the scope of the intended clearing and includes an undertaking to revegetate or rehabilitate alternative sites.

The proposed process has the potential for significant delay, given that the conservator must specify principles when deciding whether or not to approve a draft vegetation management plan. These are mandatory principles and their application is based upon a wide range of scientific information that may or may not be readily available. This scheme, if implemented as is, would have major implications in relation to the ACT Planning and Land Authority’s ability to consider development applications in a timely manner. There would be extreme pressure on the conservator to give quick responses to the authority.

For this scheme to be implemented effectively, it would require significant resources and impose inevitable delays on decision-making processes surrounding a development application. Unreasonable delays of this kind impose very unreasonable costs on applicants. The costs involved, the evidence of a need and the implications for the community are significant factors that have not been addressed in this bill, despite its laudable objectives. Accordingly, the government will not support it.

MS TUCKER (3.56): Ms Dundas’s Nature Conservation (Native Vegetation Protection) Amendment Bill 2004 seeks to protect what remains of the territory’s native vegetation in rural and urban areas outside of the territory’s nature reserves. This is important as the ACT is lagging behind other states in protecting threatened species and ecological communities from the impacts of land clearing.

In Western Australia, for example, the state government acted last week to protect government-owned, and other, urban bushland through the extension of its Bush Forever scheme. Even Queensland—until recently responsible for three quarters of all land clearing in Australia, killing 100 million native mammals, birds and reptiles each year—has beaten the territory in implementing land clearing legislation. That is a poor record for the “bush capital”.

Ms Dundas’s amendment bill also aims to impose a new requirement on the ACT government to seek approval from the Conservator of Flora and Fauna before commencing any new development. The aim is to ensure that the processes surrounding the approval of developments at East O’Malley, for example, and the Gungahlin Drive extension can never be repeated. The biggest threat to the ACT’s remnant vegetation is not from agricultural clearing, as is the case in other states, but from urban expansion—as demand for new housing developments overtakes environmental concerns.

The ACT Greens, for example, are very concerned about the preservation of important remnant ecosystems in the Mulligan’s Flat and Gooroo Reserves, which may be

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