Page 1831 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 4 May 2011
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moving a motion that the Assembly notes that the government has not delivered a number of key government strategies, policies and legislative reforms to improve sustainability in the ACT in a timely manner. The government has not delivered.
You know what? For the first time, Mr Rattenbury says something I think I can agree with. The government have not delivered. It is quite true. But then again, on environmental issues, they have not delivered for nine years. They talk the talk but they never walk the walk, and that is the problem.
The best case of that is the no waste by 2010 strategy. As Mr Rattenbury rightly points out, that expired last year. It is interesting that in this year’s budget, if you go to page 194 of BP3, we have now got $2.7 million to find a new ACT landfill site and for other studies. So not only do they not believe in the no waste strategy, their understanding of it is that it requires new landfills.
The objective back in 1996, following the public consultation and the release of that policy, was to genuinely and aggressively go about reducing the need for anything to go to landfill. And that is something the public told us in consultation. Our hope was it would develop new sustainable industries, industries that would come along, that would help us reduce waste, or new industries like Spark Solar who actually wanted to manufacture sustainability products in the ACT. But neither of those things has happened here in the ACT. Why? Because we have got a government that talk about it but do not do it and we have got a Greens party that does not hold them to account.
I think that what Mr Rattenbury calls for in paragraph (2) is not unreasonable. It is not unreasonable to ask the government to “table in the Assembly, by the first sitting day in June 2011, time lines for the public consultation, finalisation, and public release of these strategies, policies and legislative reforms listed in paragraph 1(a)”. It is not unreasonable. That is the government’s policy. It is not unreasonable that the government would tell us when they are going to do consultation and then release documents. Because of the age of some of these documents, it is not unreasonable that we actually have a guide to what the government are doing.
But again, it is the weak approach, the limp lettuce approach, where you call on the government to do something. Given Mr Corbell’s amendments will go down unless the Greens vote for them over their own, I will then move an amendment that deletes “calls on” and actually substitutes the word “directs”. This is the place that holds the executive to account. If you want to act—and you do not want to—at least act like you want to be third-party insurance. We have the right to direct the government to do something. Then if the government does not want to do that, we have the right to take it further. We should have the right to take it further. And we will have the right to take it further if the government does not do as it should.
The second paragraph, paragraph (b), then calls on the government to actually complete the strategies, policies and legislative reforms within the timetables that will be outlined.
We have an alliance that maintains this government in office, the Greens-Labor alliance. I assume the Greens went there because they thought they would get a better
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