Page 3507 - Week 08 - Thursday, 23 August 2012
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The government are also continuing at a macro level with important reforms in relation to transport planning. Ms Bresnan mentioned the Gungahlin to city corridor work. This is a particularly important body of work for the Labor government, and the detailed analyses we are undertaking are giving us a very clear picture of the benefits, costs, risks and other issues we need to address to provide rapid transit services along this corridor. We will continue with that work and provide further updates to the community. I commend the Environment and Sustainable Development Directorate budget to the Assembly.
MR SESELJA (Molonglo—Leader of the Opposition) (11.31): I did want to say a couple of things to respond to Mr Corbell. I did want to commend the Tuggeranong Hyperdome for showing responsibility and leadership in the ACTSmart program. I think that is a very good thing. We would like to see more of our businesses doing that. I know that many businesses in the ACT work very hard to recycle, to be environmentally conscious, environmentally sustainable, and I commend them when they do that. So I join Mr Corbell in commending them for doing that.
I think that those are the kinds of things that we would like to see more of. This is the point that I was making earlier. Mr Corbell was very defensive when he was talking about the state of the environment report. He was saying, “Don’t take it too seriously; it is looking backwards; it is looking backwards over the last five years,” which, coincidentally, is about half the time that Labor has been in office and covers the entirety of the time of this Labor-Greens alliance. So I do not think we should be as dismissive.
I think that perhaps Mr Corbell is being dismissive of this particular report because it is not very good for this government. I think that he is pretending that, because it is really stuff that happened years ago, when, coincidentally, they were in government, it is not relevant. But it is relevant. It is a report card and it is the best report card we have on the environment. I think that we should take it seriously. Dismissing it is an obvious ploy to try to pretend that it does not matter. It is a ploy to try to hide the embarrassment of the government which has seen the environment go backwards over the last few years.
The point I would make, and the reason I highlight the good work being done by Tuggeranong Hyperdome, is that those kinds of—
Mr Corbell: No, I was doing that, actually.
MR SESELJA: Mr Corbell says he is doing that.
MR ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Mr Hargreaves): It is getting late. Let us have a conversation through the chair, may we.
MR SESELJA: Thank you, Mr Assistant Speaker, and I do thank Mr Corbell. He did highlight the good work that is being done by the Tuggeranong Hyperdome, and I was happy to commend them. But the point is that more work should be done at that practical level and if this government did not waste money and time on all sorts of
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