Page 1824 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 4 May 2011
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our biodiversity while we rush out that land. So before we let that time line slip again, the government must outline when they will release their exposure draft, when the final bill will be released and when the consultation on that bill is expected. I would expect that if that time line is realistic, it would take us beyond the October 2012 election.
Let me conclude by commending the motion to the Assembly. It is important that we acknowledge these delays and that we put a process in place for the government to spell out when it is going to deliver the many initiatives that it has promised but failed to deliver so far. When you go through each of these items that we have listed in the motion, we find a litany of delay, obfuscation and inaction. We need strategies to know where we are going. We do not have those strategies in place, and it means that the action we are delivering is operating in a policy vacuum.
MR CORBELL (Molonglo—Attorney-General, Minister for the Environment, Climate Change and Water, Minister for Energy and Minister for Police and Emergency Services) (4.12): Mr Rattenbury’s motion today is based on a deeply flawed understanding of how policies are developed by government and fails to acknowledge both the ambition and the breadth of the government’s sustainability reforms, as well as its achievements to date. Before I address each of these matters, I want to firstly deal with some of the more fundamental issues.
From Mr Rattenbury’s patronising lecture you would clearly think that policy development is a simple, straightforward and linear process which can be delivered according to strict timetables and which does not need to take account of an ever-changing policy context dealt up by both the federal government and other developments. The only way Mr Rattenbury’s views would have any validity is if policies sprang from ideology—if we knew the answer from the beginning and simply worked back on it to justify it.
The government do not do that and we will not do it. Instead, we will develop policy first from a proper understanding of the problem we are dealing with and then undertake a comprehensive analysis of the options available to address it. It is a complex process and invariably it involves trade-off decisions around environmental, social and financial issues. Labor government policies have to solve problems and they have to work in the real world—a real world that includes, for instance, people suffering from financial hardship and a diminished ability to cope with some of the changes that are necessary to shift Canberra to a low carbon economy.
This process takes time, and I would like to remind members that we are dealing with a very wide array of policies here, most of which go to the heart of dealing with the so-called “wicked” problem of climate change. No jurisdiction anywhere in Australia or the world is doing this easily and no-one who is serious about dealing with climate change is going to prefer meeting some arbitrary time frame over getting it right.
My department is responsible for the development of all but one of the policies and strategies that Mr Rattenbury refers to. My department has prepared and continues to prepare detailed work programs for each of these and they are based on a series of important assumptions and considerations. These include staff availability, timeliness
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