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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 6 Hansard (19 June) . . Page.. 1840 ..

Debate resumed from 15 May 1997, on motion by Mr Humphries:

That this Bill be agreed to in principle.

MR CORBELL (3.47): Mr Speaker, the Labor Party will be supporting this Bill. We believe it is appropriate to provide the Commissioner for the Environment with some additional capacity which was not highlighted in the original piece of legislation. My understanding of the Bill is that it makes purely machinery amendments that allow the commissioner to undertake inquiries in public if so directed by the Minister. We welcome this, in that it will give greater accountability to the Commissioner for the Environment. It will allow the public to participate and to gain access to information in any inquiry held by the commissioner in public and generally will allow for a more open process, and we welcome that.

These amendments will also allow the commissioner to report on a broader range of subject matters in the annual State of the Environment Report, and that is also to be welcomed. We also welcome the obligation that the Bill places on the Minister to respond to the Commissioner for the Environment's report formally in the Assembly, and to report on why the Government has not responded should that occur. We welcome all of these provisions. It does seem to be a very straightforward piece of legislation. We believe it will provide a more open process for the commissioner to undertake public inquiries, and it places additional responsibilities on the Government. I flag that the Labor Party will be supporting the amendment that I understand will be moved by Ms Horodny in regard to information included in the annual report. Again, we believe that the proposals she will be putting forward are appropriate. They will allow the commissioner greater breadth in reporting on certain matters, and we will be supporting them.

MS HORODNY (3.49): Mr Speaker, the Greens will be supporting this Bill, with one amendment which I will refer to later. The Bill basically changes the requirement for the Commissioner for the Environment to prepare State of the Environment Reports from an annual basis to a triennial basis. The Greens had some involvement with the development of this Bill. There have been a number of discussions and letters between the Minister and the Greens on this matter over the last year regarding what we would and would not accept in the Bill. We are very pleased to have worked with the Minister on this, and I am very pleased that we worked out the differences of opinion before the tabling of the Bill. I think it would be good if the Minister tried this consultative approach a bit more often, because I think it makes it easier to get passage through this Assembly.

We accept the Government's argument that the existing annual State of the Environment Report shows little variation in environmental conditions from year to year but requires a lot of preparation work. We are prepared to allow triennial reporting, with a number of conditions. Primarily, we do not want the state of the environment to be forgotten about for three years. We still want mechanisms in place to ensure that the Government responds promptly to the recommendations of the commissioner's report. We note that the Bill requires the Government to make a response within six months of the triennial report being released. Ideally, we would have liked this period to be a bit shorter.

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