Page 136 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 15 February 2012
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and by then commissioner Maxine Cooper. Whilst the feedback unanimously indicated that the role should be expanded to include sustainability matters, no legislative changes were made.
Despite this absence of legislative change, the extent of the commissioner’s sustainability-related work has grown. The past four state of the environment reports have all contained chapters on sustainability and have used the national headline sustainability indicators, whilst the 2007 report included an update of the ACT’s ecological footprint.
In short, the ACT government has, since the commissioner’s office was enacted, increased the scope of its sustainability work. A considerable portion of this work has been assumed by the commissioner and, in recognition of this, the government and community have been in agreement for several years now that the commissioner’s functions should be expanded in practice and law to include sustainability matters. That the legislation has not been updated to parallel these changes is an oversight addressed by this bill.
I would now like to turn to the background to the tabling and response requirements, because the second area that the bill seeks to resolve is the presence of loopholes within the act relating to the tabling of and responses to the commissioner’s reports. Under the existing legislation, all reports produced by the commissioner are tabled in the Assembly via the minister within 15 days of their being presented to the minister. However, this procedure has contributed to significant tabling delays.
A recent example is the case of the commissioner’s audit of government environmental performance reporting. Presented to the minister in October 2010, this report was not tabled in the Assembly until 6 December 2011, 13 months later. The report revealed significant inconsistencies and inaccuracies in government agencies’ environmental monitoring and reporting procedures, and yet 15 months since its completion none of its recommendations have been responded to.
Similarly, a range of reports regarding the expansion of the commissioner’s role have been prepared over the past several years. However, these have not been tabled in the Assembly. Had these reports been tabled, the legislation may have been amended sooner to more accurately reflect the commissioner’s expanded role. By imposing more stringent tabling obligations upon the minister, these delays are more likely to be avoided.
The current act also lacks comprehensive requirements for the minister to respond to reports from the commissioner. A six-month response time frame is required only for state of the environment reports. Time frames for all other reports are not specified. This effectively enables the minister to ignore any findings and recommendations made by the commissioner which are made outside the state of the environment reporting framework.
As it currently stands, the Commissioner for the Environment Act is not consistent with the government’s stated commitment to the principles of open government. It is similarly inconsistent in ensuring that the findings and recommendations made by a
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