Page 2711 - Week 08 - Thursday, 24 August 2006
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not think he will last very long.” And he is gone. I think part of the reason that these people are going is that they have lost their relevance and they have lost the ear of the minister. Perhaps to some extent it is a status thing—and I do not mean that in a boo-hiss sense—but they have been effectively demoted and put away. I think that that is a real problem.
MADAM TEMPORARY DEPUTY SPEAKER (Mrs Burke): The member’s time has expired.
MRS DUNNE: I would like to take my next 10 minutes, Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker.
I think that is a real problem that this minister needs to get on top of or he will be losing much more expertise out of Environment ACT and important environment areas. I have jokingly said that the minister is a bit of a neophyte when it comes to the environment, and I am not going to give him too hard a time on that, but you have to be open and you have to make every post a winner. I think the minister’s performance indicates that he is not particularly comfortable in the area and he needs to get over that fairly soon and start scoring some goals in environmental areas.
The leak of a list of possible cuts in the past three or four weeks is a sign of the malaise in the organisation. Some of the things on that list were pretty preposterous. I do not think that, even in his most deranged moments early in the morning or late at night, this minister or any other minister would seriously contemplate handing Namadgi National Park over to the New South Wales government for management.
The leaking of that list tells us that this is an organisation in crisis. I have watched and worked with people from Environment ACT for a very long time. I was working for Minister Humphries as his environment adviser when Environment ACT was set up in roughly its present form. I have had nothing but professional service from these people. I might have disagreed with them on matters, there might have been points of difference, but they were always professional. This is an organisation that does not leak. When they start leaking you know that there is a huge problem with morale.
People are concerned about their future. They do not know when their jobs are going to be cut. They do not know whether they are going to be doing the job that they were trained to do. They are very committed people. We may disagree sometimes, but we have to remember that they are working for what they see as being in the best interests of something that they are passionate about. They train. Often they have very substantial scientific qualifications. They are committed to working in areas that in some ways are not particularly well remunerated, but they do it for the love of the job.
It seems to me that when they start to leak in the way that we have seen in the last few weeks, there is a serious problem that this minister needs to get on top of, and he needs to get on top of it in a hurry. Really, what it boils down to is that there is nothing environmental in this budget. We have seen a complete abdication of the environment. Yesterday Mr Hargreaves chided me because I had not talked about the $350,000 cat fence or predator fence around Mulligans Flat. I just think it is a misplaced priority. If you are going to spend $350,000 on land management, I could think of many better ways of doing it than building a cat fence. It is a can-have, rather than a must-have.
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