Page 3087 - Week 07 - Thursday, 30 June 2011
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name [see schedule 1 at page 3176]. This just substitutes the new name for the Environment and Sustainable Development Directorate. That is all this amendment does.
MS LE COUTEUR (Molonglo) (9.18): There are a lot of issues to talk about in our newly named directorate—the Environment and Sustainable Development Directorate. It includes, of course, ACTPLA and, of course, also the old DECEEW. But I will start with the heritage area. Given the two recent fires which destroyed the heritage-listed Diamant Hotel and the Services Club and the vandalism of the hut at Hume, I am quite concerned about the state of heritage preservation in the ACT.
I note again that the government has done very little to assist the Heritage Council to address its still 10-year backlog of heritage listing nominations. It would seem that the recent move of heritage into the sustainable development directorate is not going to help matters. I am disappointed to see that the government has not as yet responded to the Heritage Act review, and, in particular, to the recommendation that a full-time heritage compliance officer be funded, because it is a substantial issue.
Moving on to waste, I will start by re-expressing my disappointment that there is currently no waste policy and there has not been one for almost two years. As flagged in my speech for the TAMS directorate on Tuesday night, I am disappointed that the sustainable waste strategy is not due to be released now until October or so this year. The distinct downward trend of resource recovery figures clearly shows what not having a strategy has done to the ACT. We are seeing the impact of not having properly addressed waste over the last five or six years. We need a new waste strategy which reflects current best practice and technology. We are getting tired of the environmental rhetoric we hear from the government in relation to waste. We want to see some actual, real commitments to achieving outcomes.
As this budget clearly shows, there has been a further decrease in recycling rates and a further increase in waste per capita. The Greens have put forward a range of recommendations in our submission to the draft ACT sustainable waste strategy. Our recommendations take a source-separation approach to recycling where items are separated into different containers by the resident or by the business. This is distinct from the government’s proposal to continue the current mixed or dirty MRF processing approach.
Source separation means that you can recover clean items and organics for recycling, which allows them to be recycled for the highest use. We have for a long time promoted the benefits of introducing a third bin for organics collection. This is an excellent and easy-to-implement example of source separation—separating organics at source is vastly superior to recovering organic matter in a dirty MRF, where any organic material recovered tends to be contaminated.
We would also like to remind the Labor Party—as we have on many occasions—about the Greens-Labor Party parliamentary agreement, which calls on the government to conduct a trial of organic waste collection. That is part of our calls for the government’s new waste strategy. Other recommendations include the government introducing public-place recycling so as to maximise the recovery of
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