Page 1834 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 4 May 2011
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highest anymore. We have dropped to 69 per cent. Our target next year is even worse, at 68 per cent. We are expecting in our budget targets this year to have a higher amount of waste per person than we have had in the past. This is not going in the right direction. This is not showing that we have a strategy. We are showing that we do not have a strategy.
The budget paper shows, I suppose, what our default strategy is. Our default strategy appears to be that we are going to put $7.25 million aside for studies on building new landfill. So we have gone back to the lowest common denominator waste strategy. This is very poor. It is appalling. We can do better than that. We should do better than that. We have done better than that in the past. There is no reason for us to drop backwards.
The Greens have attempted to put forward a waste strategy. Mr Smyth mentioned the parliamentary agreement. There were waste items in the parliamentary agreement. I guess I can say we are pleased that, in the absence of a strategy, the government have funded some of this in this last budget. They have funded a one-year trial for recycling bins, which is great. It shows the government understand the benefits of soil separation and have finally got around to doing this. But they have not delivered on the trial of a third bin for organic waste. There are a lot of things about soil separation that they have not delivered on. We put in a detailed submission to the waste strategy.
I cannot, of course, summarise it in the time that we have got, but basically I would say that the high level approach of the government seems to be going in the right direction. We support their putting in an ambitious resource recovery target of greater than 90 per cent, a streaming and cascading approach to waste, which seeks to achieve the highest and best use of resources. They looked at opportunities to manage biosolids more sustainably. We support all of these. Our issues are about the level below. What are we actually going to do? We are very concerned about organic waste. It is an area which I understand the Liberals are also concerned about.
We need to look very strongly at source separation of materials and recycling materials at their highest use. That seems to be an area where, in the absence of a detailed strategy, the government have dropped the ball. Their draft strategy has been looking at comingling strategies, a dirty MRF. We think that is going in the wrong direction. It is not going to the 90 per cent resource recovery target; it is going to a lowest common denominator target.
Another strategy that we desperately need, which my colleague Mr Rattenbury mentioned, is a sustainable transport action plan, or transport for Canberra plan. As the Greens’ planning spokesperson, transport is something which is of considerable interest to me. A lot of planning is about where the transport corridors go and how the transport works. Canberra will not work unless the transport works. We have just been debating transport for Gungahlin. Transport and planning are intimately connected. We have got to get the transport right; we have got to get the planning right. We do not appear to have any transport strategy.
Mr Corbell’s statement that the government is investing in transport is abundantly true. The government is spending a lot of money on transport. But the Greens would
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