Page 3236 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 21 September 1994
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STATE OF THE ENVIRONMENT
Paper
MR WOOD (Minister for Education and Training, Minister for the Arts and Heritage and Minister for the Environment, Land and Planning (3.12): For the information of members, I present the Australian Capital Territory State of the Environment Report prepared by the Office of the Commissioner for the Environment and move:
That the Assembly takes note of the paper.
Mr Deputy Speaker, it is with considerable pleasure that, under section 22 of the Commissioner for the Environment Act 1993, I table the ACT State of the Environment Report. This report and the annual report I just tabled are the first to be produced by the ACT's first Commissioner for the Environment, Dr Joe Baker. Dr Baker and his staff are to be commended for their enormous efforts in putting together the State of the Environment Report, which is a very comprehensive assessment of the ACT's environment and of environmental management in the ACT. This is the first such report. It is ground-breaking stuff and it has required an enormous amount of effort to find the means of presenting this report. Dr Baker and his staff have done a magnificent job. I want to commend also the large number of people who have been involved in the reference groups and have provided considerable assistance to Dr Baker in presenting the report.
The Government established the Office of the Commissioner for the Environment in the interests of increasing its accountability to the ACT community on its environment management record. It is important in this context to note that, in accordance with the Commissioner for the Environment Act, the report has been prepared independently of direction or constraint by me or government departments or agencies. The Act does, however, provide for the report to include "such matters as may be specified by instrument by the Minister". For the 1994 report, I exercised this right by directing the commissioner to report on ACT government agency compliance with the ACT greenhouse strategy and to recommend ways to increase the effectiveness of agency actions.
The report represents the contributions and efforts, as I said, of many people and organisations, government and non-government, who have worked collaboratively in addressing both its format and its content. The commissioner undertook extensive consultation with government agencies and with members of the public, through public meetings, to determine and explain the format of the report. The report is based on the framework used for OECD state of the environment reporting, using the interactions between environmental conditions, pressures and responses to comment on the state of the environment. In its simplest form, this means that the report is designed to comment on the environment and on environmental management, by reporting on the condition of the five key resources of land, water, atmosphere, plants and animals and the urban environment.
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