Page 2697 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 21 September 2022

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environment.” Yet they can come out with this newsletter 11 times a year, at the cost of 1,612 trees every four years that would be saved if the newsletter reverted to being delivered four times a year.

Once again, the Greens are given the opportunity to stand by the things that they once stood for, to stand up for the things that they say matter to them, to stand up and be counted, rather than just talking about something. I would have thought that they would choose the environmental values that they have been aligned with for so many years. But it appears that that is not the case today. Surprise! Is this once again, “Don’t do as I do, do as I say,” from this Labor-Greens government? It is disappointing; I guess that is an understatement.

I would like to thank Mr Parton for bringing this motion today and highlighting that hypocrisy, highlighting the number of trees that could be saved, highlighting the amount of money that could be saved, and highlighting that this is a government that likes to virtue signal and tell you what you have to do without actually doing it themselves.

MR PARTON (Brindabella) (5.09): For the benefit of Mr Pettersson, this has my speech on it, so it is definitely not a prop.

What a weak and pathetic response from ACT Labor, and an even weaker and more pathetic response from the Greens! What we see here with Labor is that the climate heroes, the people who cast themselves in the role of saving the planet, are happy for someone else to do it.

The people, the Greens, who lay awake at night thinking about waste, about saving forests, and who lay awake at night thinking about recycling, are just going to look the other way and support their climate-trashing friends. When it comes to the distribution of political propaganda, the climate emergency is not really an emergency; it is an emergency for someone else to deal with.

What we see from the Chief Minister’s amendment is that the situation we have highlighted in this motion is actually much worse than we have portrayed. Mr Barr indicated in his amendment that the government recently changed to non-recycled imported paper stock. I would love to know how recently that change was made.

We also had references made to the Your Say 2020 survey, which, apparently, so much of the information that we have had in this debate today is based on. I would note that nobody in this survey was asked, “Would you like the newsletter 11 times a year or four times a year?” That question was not asked. All we have are some responses from a collection of people, and 31 per cent of them, which we gather equates to 186 people, based on what we have seen, said that their preferred communication method was via the newsletter sent by mail. No questions were asked about how often. On the basis of that, why don’t you ramp it up to fortnightly? If 31 per cent is what you require to win an election, we may have to rethink some things, because it is not really a big figure, is it? I have gone through this survey
at length, and there is no question at all asked about how often you would like to receive it.


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