Page 3388 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 20 August 2008

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He mentions that food contributes to 41 per cent to our eco footprint. He has the idea that we should produce food in the suburbs in which we live. He and another group of people have set up a group called Food for the Future. The newspaper article states:

… Food for the Future will turn grungy, working-class Chippendale into a model of urban feeding. Bringing in a food truck a week—and carting out inner-city coffee grounds and food scraps—it will make a direct link from Hawkesbury grower to city customer, sidelining the supermarkets.

Of course, we would not want to do that, would we? The article continues:

Now that’s grassroots.

It will also establish community gardens, lobby for productive street trees, help people leakify their storm drains and hold a Hawkesbury growers’ fair, scheduled for October.

So let us look at our green waste really constructively. We could grow food in our streets—we might have to—and we could also work in an arrangement with local farmers whereby our organic waste becomes their compost and the food goes back. To me, that is an exciting idea. I am glad that Michael Mobbs is doing that in Sydney but we could do it here.

My motion was a catch-all one. I particularly wanted to focus on the commissioner for the environment’s recommendations because I have a feeling that the government will accept those in time. I do not see how it cannot, because they are such sensible recommendations. I think that the government is looking for a positive step forward on waste. It does not have a good community image on waste and it needs to take a next step, or several. I commend the commissioner for the environment for proposing what that should be. I ask the government, no matter what Mr Hargreaves has said today, to go and talk to the officers in the Office of Sustainability and hear what they are saying about the movement of waste.

It is a pretty exciting time. We have got challenges ahead of us, but we can make those challenges into adventures instead of using them as another chance to be vituperative, bludgeoning and bullying, which is what I believe the minister has chosen to do to me for putting forward this motion.

Question put:

That Mr Hargreaves’s amendment be agreed to.

The Assembly voted—

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