Page 4174 - Week 12 - Thursday, 1 December 2022
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Mr Deputy Speaker, thank you for your patience with me this year, and with this speech tonight. As Tony Stark said, “Part of the journey is the end.” With that, I wish you all a peaceful and enjoyable summer season.
Waste—Tarago proposed industrial waste incinerator
MS CLAY (Ginninderra) (4.30): I gave my end-of-year adjournment speech yesterday. I am sorry I am going to change the tone a little bit, because there is something serious that has come up that I need to check-in with to make sure members are aware of it.
There is a proposal for an industrial waste incinerator in Tarago, and a lot of people are quite concerned about this. I will be lodging a submission about this for the ACT Greens, and I am pleased to hear that I understand the ACT government will also be lodging a submission about this.
We have received a petition about it here in the Assembly. We have 919 signatures on that petition. There is a group called Communities Against the Tarago Incinerator. They have got quite a lot of information up about this on their website as well. It is a really simple matter: we simply do not need thermal incineration. We have banned thermal incineration here in the ACT. We have just committed, this week, to introduce the right to a healthy environment into our ACT human rights legislation, which is great news.
There are a lot of locals in Canberra and in Tarago, and food growers and wine growers in our region, who are really concerned about the impact this might have on our air and on our water. If you are interested in finding out more, I would encourage you to jump onto the “No Tarago Incinerator” website or to have a look at the information in the petition.
Valedictory
MR COCKS (Murrumbidgee) (4.32): Tomorrow marks four months since I was sworn into this Assembly. It seems hard to believe that I have been here for such a short time. I will try to be brief in my remarks today, but it is hard when there are so many people to thank who have helped make this transition so much easier for me.
I will start with some of the first people to give me support, which is the Assembly staff—the Clerk and everyone who works here. Without that support, I would have been lost. Thank you to my colleagues, all of whom have reached out and provided support at one time or another throughout this very brief period. They have offered me advice, offered observations when I have done well and, more frequently, offered more words of advice when I have messed something up!
I would really like to thank my staff. In the first few days, and first couple of weeks, in this place, I walked in, and I had an empty office. It was not until Liam joined my team, and set everything up and made everything work, that walking into this place felt welcoming and felt like a place where I was coming to work and getting things done each day. Liam, thank you very much.
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