Page 1145 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 2 April 2019
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I move:
That the Assembly take note of the paper.
MS LE COUTEUR (Murrumbidgee) (11.19): I thank Minister Steel for his statement. I have not got time to go through it in detail, but it is very pleasing to see in there a number of things that the Greens have been pushing for for a long period—the ones I have talked about.
In the “talked about” category I put in Monash Drive. I imagine that probably everyone in this Assembly shares my frustrations, and I am pleased to see Minister Steel’s frustrations on this. It was part of our agreement with the Labor Party in 2008 to move it out of the ACT map. I am glad that everyone in the ACT has recognised that we do not want a road at the bottom of Mount Ainslie. There is simply no need for it, given how Canberra has developed, and it is a great pity that our federal colleagues do not spend enough time in Canberra to actually recognise what would seem to me to be the bleeding obvious.
Other things that we have been advocating for a long time and that Mr Steel talked about include LED lights in our street network. I think it is great that this is finally happening. It will reduce greenhouse gas emissions and in the long term also reduce costs for the ACT.
I am particularly pleased also to hear that more effort is going to be going into compliance with our various laws. Often we find in the ACT that we actually have quite good legislation but it has been let down because it is simply not being implemented. Dogs is obviously one area that comes to mind, but it is not just dogs. It is littering; it is parking; it is almost everything. City services are particularly important because most people think that is what the ACT government does, I suspect. They do not really realise that we in fact run education and health and that we are not just a council but a state. We are often referred to as the council, which is a little depressing.
Moving to another area which I have a little more to say about—waste—I am glad that this is something that has moved in the importance level. I am really, really looking forward to more discussion and more practical statements about what the government is going to do about reducing plastic waste. This is clearly a major problem. I was going to say it is an emerging problem. It is not an emerging problem. We have known about it for a long time. That was why in 2008, in the Seventh Assembly, we worked for and we banned plastic bags. That was the first step. We need to go further, and I very much look forward to seeing what that is going to be in practice.
On organic waste—and I am glad that the minister mentioned that—I would like to say that the first thing to do with organic waste, the obvious thing to do with organic waste now that we have a green bin system, is to put organic waste that comes from your kitchen as well as organic waste that comes from your garden into those green bins. As a gardener friend of mine was saying, this just does not make sense. “I pick
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