Page 3102 - Week 08 - Thursday, 25 June 2009
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hearings. A spokesperson from the conservation council, the ACT’s peak body and advocacy group, said:
We are almost always broke all the time … we have a major fundraising campaign, like all NGOs, to raise funds.
The Environment Centre staff confessed:
We dive under the desk every time the ANU come around.
This was in regard to the five-year lease the Environment Centre has yet to sign with the ANU. I think this is a real shame. If there is one thing we know, it is that our community groups can run incredibly effective programs on the smell of an oily rag. It is really important that we do not lose these programs, such as the Richardson primary school garden, the harvest festival and e-ways programs because of the shortfall in funding.
MR SESELJA (Molonglo—Leader of the Opposition) (11.11): Madam Assistant Speaker Dunne, in the time available, there are a few areas which I would like to touch on. I know that you will be speaking to this issue as well. The issue of the zero net emissions target was something that we heard a lot about during the estimates process. I think it is fair to say that what we saw was an announcement with very little, if anything, to actually back it up.
We asked about agencies moving towards zero net emissions and about the ACT moving towards zero net emissions, and it seems to me, from the questioning, that the statement was one of those aspirational statements with really nothing to back it up. We need to be careful not to just have tokenism in these areas. It might get Mr Corbell a nice headline when he says “zero net emissions”, but when you have got no actual plan to get there you do have to question why you would bother to make the announcement. If you want to say it is an aspiration and you are very clear that you are not setting out a path on how you are going to get there, that would be one thing. But to make the statement without anything to back it up, I think, does call into question the usefulness and the value of such things.
We heard a bit about the arboretum and it being a climate change measure. Obviously, this has been discussed today in the media but we saw, even with the carbon sequestration study which was tabled today in the Assembly—and I have only had a brief chance to look over some of the document—how little, in fact, the arboretum will do in sequestering carbon. We saw in the carbon sequestration study that it was clear that the urban forest, as far as trees go, is far more effective than the non-urban and that, indeed, the arboretum would make up such a small amount of that. I think it is about being honest about what these measures are for.
In regard to the arboretum, which we always believed was not money well spent, the intent was never about climate change. Let us face it, the intent was tourism. That is in and of itself a very worthy goal. We do not believe it is a great use of taxpayers’ money. We do not believe that an arboretum in a drought was the right way to go, particularly as we have other arboreta around town, some of which are not being
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