Page 2274 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 9 May 2012
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Certainly this is where the minister and I have had an interesting set of discussions. The minister has asserted that the commissioner sits within the executive and therefore it is appropriate for the reports to come to the executive. And I acknowledge the minister’s arguments on that front. I think my preference would be to see the commissioner playing a role in which they reported more directly to the Assembly. It is a source of frustration that it takes four to five months to get the state of the environment report through to the Assembly when it would have been a valuable document to have had in the public space.
To my mind, something like the state of the environment report, which is essentially an asset of the people of the ACT—it is an audit; it tells us how we are going as a community—should be in the public space as soon as it is available and not have to go through the process of going through government and various sign-off processes and response processes. I think it is quite okay for the report to come out and then for the government and everybody to have a discussion about that and for the government some months later to potentially make a response. But that is not where we find ourselves at the end of the day.
I have appreciated discussions with the minister’s office. From looking at some of the amendments that are going to come up later—I will come back to them shortly—the bill was very much about seeking to give the commissioner more direct access to the Assembly, and the Assembly more timely access to the information from the commissioner. I think the commissioner does play a very valuable role in the ACT. The recent state of the environment report was an example. I think that it highlighted both areas where the ACT has made progress and areas where we have got a lot more to do.
I think, looking at Mr Seselja’s remarks, what it really highlights is that it is like turning around an oil tanker. If you go back to the 2007 state of the environment report, we had some pretty serious problems there. I think that in the last four years we have made progress in some areas. In other areas it has been business as usual. Mr Seselja did not go into the details of some of my remarks—that is how it usually goes in this place—but I observed the fact that the commissioner highlights that there has been a continued significant investment in roads and not nearly the investment in new public transport infrastructure. These are the trends that have been very difficult to turn around and we will continue to stand up for those things.
I note that Mr Seselja is highly critical of the fact that we have not made as much progress in four years as we might have liked. That is a debatable point but one can only imagine what might have been the situation if Mr Seselja had been in charge of the ACT for those four years and where we might be now. I imagine that we would be a whole lot worse off and nowhere near beginning to turn some of those trends around. I think the way that Mr Seselja talks about Throsby is testimony to that. Throsby was assessed under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act, an act introduced by the Howard government in 1996 because even John Howard could recognise that not every part of Australia should be concreted over. That does not seem to be Mr Seselja’s position.
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