Page 442 - Week 01 - Thursday, 11 December 2008
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MS GALLAGHER (Molonglo—Treasurer, Minister for Health, Minister for Community Services and Minister for Women) (10.14): I will speak briefly to this line in place of Minister Corbell who is travelling interstate to a ministerial council meeting.
Mrs Dunne: He was at the National Gallery when I was there.
MS GALLAGHER: He came back from the National Gallery and sat here until 9 o’clock. He is en route to Adelaide for a ministerial council meeting tomorrow and he has a pair, I understand.
Mr Hanson: He does have a pair, but he is not en route.
MS GALLAGHER: Thank you very much, just for the record.
This appropriation, $9 million or so over four years, will provide a very significant increase in the ACT government’s ability and the ACT community’s ability to respond to the policy imperatives of environment, climate change, energy and water. While it means extra bureaucrats, we believe that this is, and will be in the future, one of the most significant areas and one that requires the highest level of priority in policy response from government. I think we have heard uniform agreement that establishing a new department is a good thing to do.
This is a very small, when you look at it over four years, allocation. It will provide, I think, an extra 16 staff to the number of staff that will come across from TAMS. We have looked very closely at keeping the cost to an absolute minimum. I understand agreement has been reached on the transfer of staff from TAMS to the new department.
This funding will, of course, support the recruitment of a chief executive for this department, extra policy staff and those other areas that Mrs Dunne went to in terms of what you need when you set up a new department, including audit capacity and some of those one-off costs of establishing a new department such as getting a website in place. We have very much tried to keep the recurrent cost low but at the same time we realise that what we all want here is to establish a department that can have an increased and intensified focus in this area of government policy.
In relation to capital, there has been $100,000 allocated for minor capital works requirements for the annex of Macarthur House. It is a very small amount of money to be able to respond to some of the challenges when you move a different set of workers into an environment that has been used by another group. That is the detail I can give on that.
There was one question on the solar feed-in tariff. This is to fast-track the solar feed-in tariff, in line with our election commitments and in line with the parliamentary agreement with the Greens. This will support two staff to fast-track this and have it in place by 1 March 2009, at the latest. Noting that this is a very tight time frame, this increased appropriation will hopefully allow those increased resources to be met in that time frame.
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