Page 3267 - Week 09 - Tuesday, 18 August 2009
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or the continued diversion of waste from landfill—it seems to me that you create essentially a picture or a scenario that is not reflected in the truth and that makes it harder to address as a community. You berate, deny the effort, deny the success, deny the will and deny the application of considerable resources.
The outstanding results in relation to waste and diversion of waste that we have achieved as a government—and successive governments and as a community—are an achievement, an outcome, that has been achieved only through significant investment. I do not have comparative numbers with me, but that achievement would not have been possible or realised without the ACT government consistently resourcing waste collection and the diversion of waste from landfill at a level equal to or higher than most other metropolitan cities or jurisdictions within Australia.
It is relevant as we look to that last 25 per cent and it becomes incrementally more difficult. It is fair to say that the first yard is the easiest. It is the last yards in relation to the diversion of waste from landfill that are the hardest. We are at 75 per cent; we are at a higher level than any other place in Australia.
We are at the hard and difficult end of diversion of waste. We are at the expensive end of the issue, and, in the context of available resources, a pie that has to be spread across all of the government’s policy responsibilities and responsibilities to the community. It is a pie which, for all policy issues beyond health, diminishes year on year, because our application to the health needs of the community grows year on year, to a point where the entire budget that health will consume within a few years—up to 30 per cent of the entire budget: an incremental, almost percentage, increase a year, year on year, in terms of that increasing exposure to the healthcare cost and need.
We have done particularly well, but there are not unlimited resources. There is a whole range of initiatives that have been proposed and suggested. They are all ideal. The government made a number of commitments in the last election campaign, most particularly commitments which we will meet. We began that process.
The minister for the environment has announced initiatives that were pursued as recently as within the last week. The government made a significant investment in waste management through the last budget in relation to a project that will of itself, through an additional, incremental increase in funding provided in our last budget, reduce another 20,000 tonnes of waste a year from landfill through initiatives funded in this year’s budget just two months ago—another 20,000 tonnes diverted from landfill as a result of that initiative.
But these are recurrent costs; these are operational costs and they are significant costs. Those things need to be understood and acknowledged. Without understanding and acknowledging them, we cannot progress.
There is the issue that Ms Le Couteur thinks is irrelevant, an acknowledgement of the nature of our community. I think Ms Bresnan went to the same issue: that it is not relevant to acknowledge—it is a cop-out or it is defeatist to suggest that—that we, as a relatively prosperous community, with a very large footprint, are generating waste at a level higher than any other place in Australia. Why do we do that? Because we are necessarily or intrinsically wasteful? No: because we are prosperous and we buy more,
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