Page 2622 - Week 08 - Thursday, 24 August 2006
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MR SPEAKER: Yes.
DR FOSKEY: Consultation is a farce when the government opens proceedings with two straw men, a paper tiger and a fait accompli. The sustainability legislation and the Office of Sustainability now fall within the portfolio of the Minister for Territory and Municipal Services. I think this is a mistake. The Office of Sustainability was established to ensure across-government understanding and education and to assist departments to achieve compliance with the principles of sustainability. This is best achieved in the central agency, and in the government that is the Chief Minister’s Department. The Auditor-General’s report on ecologically sustainable development made a number of extremely valuable recommendations that were endorsed, in part, by the Chief Minister, but it is obvious that her office’s advice was basically disregarded in the drafting of this year’s budget.
I urge the Treasurer to rekindle his enthusiasm for sustainability measures and I urge the Treasury to recruit and develop environmental and social expertise with which to evaluate the true state of the ACT’s accounts. Natural capital is not worthless or less valuable merely because it cannot be traded. It can certainly be squandered. By way of example, the amount of soil which is currently being lost off government controlled areas of the Brindabellas should be accounted for somewhere in this budget. Food, unlike money, grows on trees. Trees need soil and it takes hundreds of thousands of years for natural processes to develop soil. So it should be treasured and not treated like dirt!
Many other jurisdictions use their superannuation investments to fund their public housing programs. I urge the Treasurer to examine their programs seriously with an eye to investing some of our own super funds in public housing for the ACT. The rate of return may not be as high as other parts of the market, but neither is the risk. I have never heard of banks and credit agencies turning up their nose at bricks-and-mortar investments. This is an area where it is not wise to listen to the squawking of the development lobby. Of course they want government out of the field of housing and of course they want access to all those inner-city government properties. I am aware that Treasury is probably putting pressure on ACT Housing to realise some of those properties. I urge the government not to cave in to them. Canberra has benefited from a century of social mix but many developers seem to consider it obscene that public housing is allowed to remain in Reid and Yarralumla.
There is presently a disturbing lack of consistency in the performance indicators used by various departments in their budget papers. There is no way that we, as budget readers, can be sure how various indicators have been used by different departments. It is important that performance indicators are consistent and capable of being compared across departments and through time.
It is possible that the functional review’s recommendations to simplify administrative structures and to improve policy development and service delivery could improve outcomes in terms of whole-of-government use of sustainability indicators and better reporting practices. This simplification of administrative structures certainly presents the opportunity to implement holistic and comprehensive triple bottom line reporting practices. I urge Treasury officials to grasp this opportunity and to put into practice the current Treasurer’s powerful endorsement of sustainability indicators at last year’s
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