Page 1533 - Week 04 - Thursday, 7 April 2011
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The debate today underscores the fact that this has been a tediously long process, and it is well worth reviewing the history. It has taken five years to get to this stage. There was a draft management plan promulgated in 2005 and in December 2007, two years later, a revised draft plan of management was referred to the then Standing Committee on Planning and Environment.
There were some interesting goings-on in the Standing Committee on Planning and Environment and I am really glad to be able to remind people today of the actions of some of the members of the committee who really did try to subvert a proper inquiry. When the revised draft management plan was brought to the committee, it was not published and as a member of the committee I could not get it published, so that when we conducted consultation the community were being consulted on a document that they could not see. They were working on the original draft plan, not the revised draft plan, and we were in the untenable situation where, because we could not publish the document, and the responsible department would not publish the document, I had to bring a motion into the Assembly to force the committee of which I was a member to publish the document.
I think the two government members of the committee at the time wanted to force my hand and call my bluff. But when push came to shove the minister realised what an untenable position they were in and the government agreed that the report should be published, so that when we conducted a consultation on the draft management plan members of the committee who wanted to contribute knew what we were talking about. It was an untenable position and it shows the level of arrogance that the government has in relation to this and the lack of regard the government has in relation to the management of 63 per cent of the territory’s landmass.
Mr Rattenbury has touched upon a whole range of issues about land management and about reporting on land management that are of considerable concern to the broad sectors of the community. As I said before, as a member of the relevant committee I had to make the unprecedented move of coming into the Assembly to seek the agreement of the Assembly to the publishing of a document. Eventually, the committee reported on its inquiry in July 2008 and it made 22 recommendations. In May 2010, almost two years after that, the government finally managed to respond to those recommendations. Then in August the government released the final management plan for the Namadgi national park and here we are today, in April 2011, eight months after the release of the final management plan, talking about the government response which is a year old.
What this boils down to is that the government are madly scrambling for something, anything, to put on the Assembly’s program to pad out the day. Because they stand for nothing, they have no program because they have no vision for the people of the ACT. They are so desperate to put this on that they actually create a situation where the sorry history of their mismanagement of Namadgi national park can be brought up for all to see again.
The performance of the Labor members of the committee was disgraceful. The slowness of the government in this matter has been disgraceful: two years to revise
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