Page 2366 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 28 June 2005
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here today. They are all singing from the one hymn sheet, Mr Speaker, except when it comes to the money.
Mr Mulcahy: Ted is not so keen.
MRS DUNNE: Yes, perhaps the Treasurer is not so keen. I have to commend my colleagues and my staff for the work they have done on the appalling wantonness that we are buying ourselves into. We know that it proposed to have a 250-hectare arboretum. That is 1,000 acres in the old money. It is a damned lot of land, it takes a damned lot of water and it takes a damned lot of looking after. We know, and Mr Mulcahy has said it here this morning, that the amount of money it takes to run the 20 or 30-odd hectares of the national botanic gardens, a very small proportion of what Mr Stanhope is currently proposing, is $8 million a year.
Yesterday in the paper Mr Hollway said, “This will be a national icon.” If it is going to be a national icon, the nation should pay for it, not the people of the ACT. If the people of the ACT sign up to this budget line, what we will have is an open-ended bottomless pit of money that will be drawn out, and drawn out to throw at Mr Stanhope’s vanity project.
The international arboretum is quite a good idea. When the shaping our territory report first came out, I was complimentary about the diversity of ideas and the range of things that they had there. There are some good ideas there. No one on this side has ever said that, in principle, the arboretum and garden is a bad idea. We have said it is a misplaced priority. Last year the government allocated $10 million to the arboretum at a time when there was serious work to be done in land management. The previous estimates committee made recommendations about the arboretum. At the estimates committee just passed, my colleagues made recommendations about the arboretum. We have been consistent ever since it was announced. It is not that it is a bad idea. It is a misplaced priority when there is so much money to be spent on other things.
When it was first announced in last year’s budget, I immediately said, and no one has ever contradicted me, that what we needed to do was to spend that money on land management. This time Mr Seselja and Mr Mulcahy, in their dissenting comments, have reinforced these comments At paragraph 8.18 on page 19 they note that other sensible alternative allocations could have been for saving species, eradicating weeds, tackling erosion on the Lower Cotter catchment and fixing the fences between the reserves and rural lands.
There are still rural lessees in the territory who, since the fire, do not have boundary fences between their property and land administered by the government, for instance, Namadgi National Park. There are rural lessees who cannot run their properties because they do not have fences. They cannot keep their cattle out of Namadgi National Park. A rural lessee who was in Mr Smyth’s office recently was telling me the problems that he had had, the anxiety he suffers, the illness that he has suffered. He cannot manage his property because the ACT government will not come to the party and build the fences that they have a legal responsibility to build. No one denies they have a legal responsibility to build them.
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