Page 930 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 21 April 2021
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We have quite a lot of work to do to make sure that we set up an easy to use system and to make sure that system is making a high-quality product that improves our land and soils. We do not want to make some of the mistakes I have seen in other council areas, so we need to make sure that we carry out that project really well. I am pleased to see that a trial is planned later this year in Belconnen, and I am looking forward to working with the minister, stakeholders and the community as we progress, to make sure that we get a really good system in place.
Having said that, we still have a lot of work to do to turn our linear economy into a circular economy. “Circular economy” has become a bit of a buzz term, and I do not use it in that way; I mean it genuinely. For everything that we make, produce and discard, we need to make sure that we have a recycling option for it at the end of life.
That means we need much better education, we need more innovation and we need more grants in the circular economy. We also need much better data about what we are producing and what we are discarding. We need that data to be open and transparent, and we need it to be published at least every two years. That is what we will use to show where we are progressing and where we are falling behind. Without it, we simply do not know what we are doing.
There is a lot of national work to do on product stewardship, package labelling and standardising across jurisdictions. I understand that this is really slow work, and the ACT has limited control in that national sphere. I am keen to see it progress and I am really happy to help to contribute in any way that I can.
I am pleased to see another local Greens initiative rolled out—the plastics phase-out legislation. It is great to see a little bit of hope that, when we keep going and persist in a certain tricky area, we can come up with a solution. It is good to see how much consultation has been included in that rollout. I think we will end up with a really good result.
Before I move on from city services, I want to note the work that TCCS and PCS do. We have land managers working in different directorates and they are all sort of working in the same field. I think they would benefit from a little bit more coordination and strategic direction. I feel that we could get much better results with a little bit of gentle cultural change.
I hear from a lot of environmental land managers about how mowing and planting can be done in a better way if we use more local knowledge, and if we focus more on creating habitat. I feel that we can get much better outcomes and create better neighbourhoods if we make a few subtle changes in that regard.
This is a good budget, and we welcome future budgets where the ACT government focuses on city services. We would also like to see a bit more insourcing, in line with our parliamentary and governing agreement commitments.
Transport Canberra and City Services were really stretched over the last year. They had a lot of additional pressures with COVID, the bushfires, hail and all of the
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