Page 2484 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 22 August 2006
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
Minister’s flagship, the Office of Sustainability, has been removed into the new Department of Territory and Municipal Services. It is a hotchpotch. People in the territory do not know where to go. The false demarcation between energy and water policy on the one hand and everything else is bad policy. It is bad public policy and it creates an environment where no-one knows what is going on. The resources have dissipated. We are going to spend a good part of this year having people work out where the resources are, where they should be, and how many resources will remain in the Chief Minister’s Department and how many will go to Mr Hargreaves’s department, where they can be dissipated further.
We have also seen over the period of time that this Chief Minister has been in many ways the minister responsible for the environment—at all times he has had some responsibility for the environment; more or less, as times go by—a complete undermining of the environment budget. We have seen before this budget, over the previous four budgets, $6 million taken out of the environment budget. It is almost impossible to tell at the moment how much money has been taken out of the environment budget, but we know more has been taken out simply because you cannot compare like with like. There is no year-on-year-comparison effectively made, because every year the cost centres and the output classes are different.
I will speak further on that when we get to territory and municipal services. But I want to dwell on the areas of environment the Chief Minister has retained to himself and look at the litany of failure that we see here. The Chief Minister was going to have an Office of Sustainability; he was going to have the first piece of sustainability legislation that this country had ever seen. Like all the other trophies that the Chief Minister likes to collect, it was going to be the first of something. But all of those things have failed. The Office of Sustainability has always been underfunded. Now it has been shifted out, because it is just too much of a problem for the Chief Minister.
But we have areas of energy policy, or the non-existence of energy policy, still resting within the Chief Minister’s portfolio. We have been sitting, waiting since the election in 2004, for an energy policy, which is still not forthcoming. We have seen a rather thin discussion paper that ended with some very unhopeful messages from the Chief Minister’s Department about how people could make submissions on energy policy, but frankly the message was “we will disregard anything that we do not want to hear” and it was the right of the Chief Minister’s Department energy area to disregard anything that people said was inconvenient to them. We have an energy paper like that.
Once upon a time this territory proudly boasted a policy on greenhouse gas abatement. Of course it could have been better; it may have been that we should have put more resources into it earlier to get some of those measures under way quicker and sharper. But we had a policy and it was something that we would work to. If we did not achieve it, at least we were making progress. But we found with this Chief Minister that we threw out that policy.
It was interesting to hear the commentary from people in the scientific arena who work in practical areas addressing greenhouse gases, greenhouse emissions and energy efficiency and to hear the critique that they ran of this government and their failures on greenhouse policy. When this minister started to speak slightingly of the policy and how it was too difficult and too expensive, and we were not going to do it, and we were not
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .