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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 7 Hansard (19 June) . . Page.. 2077 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

telling us that that is a reality and we have scientific panels telling us that one in every two people will be in a water-stressed situation in another 25 years. That is not some silly Greens thing; that is a scientific fact. We have to change how we live on earth. That will be hard to do. We know in the ACT that it will be hard to do. If we will not be able to work together as a community to address those issues, there will be absolutely no chance of doing so, because you will always get politics and politicians who will capitalise on that division in society to progress their own agendas. That is why there is such a strong relationship in my mind and the Greens' mind between the environmental destruction that is occurring and the need to have a very strong position on social issues, social equity in particular.

In the ACT we have had a poverty task force which has just come out with a report. One of the things that that report laid quite strong emphasis on was the fact that universal access to basic services is a real issue, that people who cannot afford to pay for services now cannot access them and there is a growing trend towards that. This government may well say that that is the Commonwealth's responsibility, and in some ways it is, but the point is that I have not heard the Liberal government here condemning the federal government for their approach to health care, education, aged care, or whatever. Equally, members of the Labor Party here are not taking a strong enough position on the approach of their federal colleagues.

The GST is another issue on which there has been a total lack of coordination between acknowledging the need for social and environmental concerns and coming up with a tax policy. An economic instrument such as tax can be used to address a lot of the issues, particularly the environmental issues, we are faced with. There was a great opportunity when there was talk of tax reform to look at how to use these economic instruments to impact on how corporations particularly are operating. We lost that opportunity, thanks to the Democrats. We also had in that debate an opportunity to look at how taxation and economic instruments can be related to social issues. We lost that opportunity as well.

The ACT is still in the situation where it has to respond to the needs of the community in some way, regardless of what the federal government is doing. We have to deal with the people in our community who are disadvantaged, socially excluded and vulnerable. We have a responsibility to do everything that we can to try to diminish the impact of the bad policies of the federal government. I was hoping that we would have from the poverty task force an integrated and coherent response to that problem. Unfortunately, we do not have one. We have had some response from the government, which is to be welcomed-it is certainly better than nothing-although I have to point out again that this government has a lot to make up for because for so many years, ever since I have been here, the social issues have seemed to be side issues which have had to wait until the economic situation was, so-called, brought to order.

The government has acknowledged that, so we know that we have a fair bit of slack to pick up. The initiatives in this budget are going some way to addressing that slack, but I do not see them as a cohesive or coherent response to the broad issues that were highlighted by the poverty task force. On the question of the federal government's role, it would have been interesting to hear some kind of response from this government to those problems which were highlighted so clearly by the poverty task force.

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