Page 2930 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 30 June 2010

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program and put somewhere else, and find the $11 million in the $26 million that you propose to spend on the arboretum.” That is $26 million, on top of $20-odd million which has already been spent there.

That tree farm on Dairy Farmers Hill has become a great big black hole. We have seen in excess of $45 million go into it already—or be projected to go into it—and the people of the ACT in the meantime are seeing their trees die. They are seeing, by the Chief Minister’s own admission, increasingly daggy trees. But he is not doing anything about it. He has lost interest, and that is the problem with this whole issue.

The Greens, in typical Green fashion, say “Oh well, it is a big budget, it is nearly a $4 billion budget, so we can find $11 million somewhere else,” but they will not say where. They will not say where, and you add this to other things that we are going to see today, where the Greens are asking the government to commit to open-ended funding in other areas. How many times can you responsibly say, “Oh, we’ve got a big budget so we’ll be able to find it somewhere”?

This is the week we debate the budget, and unfortunately it is not the budget that the Canberra Liberals would have designed and it is not the budget that we would have brought through, but it is the budget that the Stanhope government has dealt us, and in the context of this budget that the Stanhope government has brought forward, we say “Take the $11 million that you have gutted from the urban forest renewal program and put it back there and take it out of the already over funded arboretum.”

This is a simple issue, and it is actually the sort of thing that people in the ACT want. Remember that for the next three years there will be no money for even thinking about how we go forward with this issue. Lots of work has been done—it is commendable work, it is difficult work—and Jon Stanhope has decided in his declining years in this Assembly that it is all too hard and he does not want to take the heat and he would much rather spend the money on his personal legacy program.

Question put:

That Ms Le Couteur’s amendment be agreed to.

The Assembly voted—

Question so resolved in the affirmative.

MR SESELJA (Molonglo—Leader of the Opposition) (4.28 p.m.): I thank members for their contributions. We are disappointed that the motion has been gutted by the Labor Party and the Greens. It is a fairly irrelevant motion now and we will not be supporting it in its amended form. We had the opportunity—

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