Page 3168 - Week 07 - Thursday, 1 July 2010
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
I feel that the Assembly made the right decision when it said that the government should continue its current process of negotiations and discussions with owners, occupiers and professional building bodies. The government will report back in September. The motion foreshadowed that at that point in time, or by November, the Assembly may well move to have its own inquiry into the issue. It is certainly a complex issue. There are no quick fixes. I think that it is appropriate that the government does the work that it can do with the experts it has available to it and then the Assembly reviews that work and sees if there is more work needed.
I will move to a different issue—data systems for ecological and planning purposes. We are very pleased that after many years the government is finally moving on integrating the various levels of ecological and vegetation mapping which TAMS, PCL, the conservator and I believe even the ESA have for bushfire management purposes into the GIS mapping system which ACTPLA use when they are laying out new areas for residential and industrial land development. This is something which was a long time coming. The Greens have been calling for it for many, many years.
It has always seemed ridiculous that when planning suburbs and then running through an EPBC or an EIS process, the government finally discover that the area that they are planning to do whatever to has high conservation value vegetation or habitat on it and we discover that the suburb should be redesigned. We know that TAMS has put a large amount of work into longer term planning to establish where our wildlife corridors should be and where our important grasslands and grassy woodlands are. But for some reason this information has not been passed from one government department to another. Rather, each department has mapped its own little silo and looked at matters independently.
The Greens are glad that there will now be some level of cooperation and information sharing. Of course, we look forward to seeing this all over government, not just in this area. Hopefully, this will be a positive result of a new centralised government building. Hopefully, this will lead to better protection of ecologically sensitive areas throughout our territory. We look forward to seeing the government’s offset policy, which we understand the government is considering.
I will just touch briefly on trees. It has been a hot topic of debate in this budget, but has not yet been mentioned in the ACTPLA context. ACTPLA actually has a big role when it comes to tree protection and tree non-protection, tree destruction, because future urban areas are not, in fact, covered by a tree protection area, which means that the planning minister and ACTPLA have significant liberties when it comes to planning development in areas where there are significant existing trees and vegetations. We are concerned about the commitment of ACTPLA, and I guess the planning minister, in terms of promoting habitat protection and biodiversity conservation. We asked about this in question time today. The minister talked about balancing competing objectives. Of course, that is always the case. The issue is how the balance is made.
We talked about Casey, where it appears that 50 per cent of the medium value of significant trees may well have been removed, and certainly the industrial suburb of Beard has seen many trees destroyed. We are concerned that Casey too may also lead to significant tree destruction.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video