Page 1833 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 4 May 2011
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like he was standing up for something. But I suspect that the reality is that the government will treat this motion like they treat so many other motions, with contempt, because that is the way the Labor Party is with the Greens.
So the question is—and I put this question to Mr Rattenbury: the Assembly was treated with contempt over the Loxton review. What would he like to do about it? We have yet to find out from Mr Rattenbury what he would like to do about it. It will be interesting to see, come the first sitting day in June 2011, how the government will react and how Mr Rattenbury will react then if the government has not complied with his motion.
This motion signifies abject failure on behalf of the ACT Greens that they cannot achieve what they want with their Labor colleagues. It is an admission of failure. In fact, in many ways, it is a signed confession that they have not been able to implement their policies. They might get to eat cake and they might amuse themselves in their offices, eating cake each time there is some sort of policy triumph. When Marie Antoinette said, “Let them eat cake,” she was being dismissive. When they say, “We get a cake—(Time expired.)
MS LE COUTEUR (Molonglo) (4.43): I rise today to support my colleague Mr Rattenbury’s motion. This is an excellent motion. As I have said many times in the past, the reason I stood for the Assembly in 2008, and unexpectedly was elected, was that I care passionately about climate change and sustainability for all human beings—in fact, all species of the world. I believe that we really need to act if we wish to have a sustainable future for people and other species.
It is really important to me, and to the Greens as a whole, that these policies are actually developed and delivered. I would also point out, though, as Mr Rattenbury did, that environmental sustainability is not the only thing that the Greens are concerned about. This is one of a set of things that the Greens are concerned about; it is not the only thing that the Greens are concerned about. We are, of course, concerned about social justice. We are concerned about grassroots democracy. We are concerned about non-violence. We are concerned about a lot of things.
But the five policies here encapsulate a lot of sustainability things which we think are important and where the government is simply not delivering its policies. They are all policies which, as Mr Rattenbury went through, are significantly overdue already. I remember doing our submissions on the energy policy. Weathering the change has been around for a while. We have some nice new copies of it. It would be really nice to see the updated version of it.
I will talk a bit more about the sustainable waste strategy because I am the Greens’ waste spokesperson. As Mr Rattenbury noted, and as I am sure all of us in the Assembly could note, the strategy is well and truly overdue. We once had a strategy called “no waste by 2010”. It is now 2011. The name says it all. We do not have a strategy. In the absence of a strategy we are not going in the right direction. Once upon a time the ACT had the best resource recovery rate. It was up to about 75 per cent. I notice that Mr Corbell has carefully adjusted his rhetoric—instead of having the highest, we now have one of the highest—because we do not have the
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