Page 3052 - Week 08 - Thursday, 7 August 2008
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The government has agreed with recommendations 4 and 5. The ACT Revenue Office will liaise with the Australian Valuation Office in future annual revaluation processes to ensure that relativities between individual blocks in an area are regularly reset by a program with regular manual revaluations of suburbs.
Commissioner for Sustainability and the Environment
Paper and statement by minister
MR STANHOPE (Ginninderra—Chief Minister, Treasurer, Minister for Business and Economic Development, Minister for Indigenous Affairs, Minister for the Environment, Water and Climate Change, Minister for the Arts): For the information of members, I present the following paper:
Commissioner for the Environment Act, pursuant to section 22—Commissioner for Sustainability and the Environment—State of the Environment Report 2007/08.
I ask leave to make a statement in relation to the paper.
Leave granted.
MR STANHOPE: Mr Speaker, I bring to the Assembly today the 2007-08 state of the environment report for tabling. I am pleased today to formally table the ACT Commissioner for Sustainability and the Environment’s Australian Capital Territory state of the environment report 2007-08. It is a requirement of the Commissioner for the Environment Act 1993 that the commissioner prepare and present to the government at regular intervals a report on the condition of our environment. It is also a requirement that the government table the report in readiness to formally respond to the commissioner’s report.
This is the sixth report and the first produced by Dr Maxine Cooper, the ACT Commissioner for Sustainability and the Environment. The state of the environment report provides an independent and expert assessment of environmental issues and progress towards achieving an environmentally secure community.
As an initiative of the first ACT Labor government, the Commissioner for the Environment Act placed the territory at the forefront of environmental accountability. The production of a state of the environment report is an enormous amount of work. The commissioner and her staff have demonstrated extraordinary commitment to meeting their obligations under the act.
The commissioner, in the 2007-08 report, has made 18 major and 60 minor recommendations on the following issues: air quality, climate change and greenhouse, conserving biodiversity, catchment quality, resource use, and community well-being. The commissioner also included a “progressing sustainability issues paper” and an “ecological footprint report”. The commissioner has found that the ACT during the reporting period has been responding to a drought, continuing to recover from the 2003 bushfires, and, along with the rest of the world, confronting the challenges of climate change. Dr Cooper has noted that we are starting to see the consequences of the good life on our environment, health and community.
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