Page 2811 - Week 09 - Thursday, 27 September 2007
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
to give further information, but he may be satisfied that the question has been answered sufficiently. That is for him to decide, not me.
The stuff that Mr Smyth talked about has to be verified, because he was very quick and easy with descriptions. He said, “Something has been taken to landfill.” By extension, it has gone to the dump. “Gone to the tip” were the actual words he used. He did not use the word “dump”; he used the word “tip”. That is fair enough but we use the word “landfill”, not “tip”. The thing is that, if something is delivered to the landfill, it does not necessarily mean that it has gone on top of the hill. It could be put into the landfill area itself and covered. It could be placed there for reuse. It could be placed there for recycling. We have battery recycling, metal recycling—all manner of recycling opportunities are available at the Mugga Lane landfill.
I would like to be satisfied about whether anything which is reusable or recyclable has actually been disposed of inappropriately. I want to check that because it does not sound quite right to me. I worked in the area of property management in that department and I know what processes they go through. I know they are not anything else but diligent. I also know, Mr Speaker, that they attempt to get the best recycling and reuse out of surplus school furniture that you could possibly imagine.
I was wondering to myself, “Where is he going with this?” Mr Smyth has never been, from my understanding, the greatest environmental advocate that I have ever struck. So was he concerned that the territory was not getting best value for its asset? I can understand that, because on many occasions in this place he has criticised the government for not getting enough value, in his view, for assets that it has disposed of. I give him credit for that; that has been his role in the past, and that is fair enough. So it is reasonable for him to ask the question: “If you have disposed of things at sale, did you realise a reasonable amount of money for them? Did you auction them, sell them, did you just give them away to your mates or what?” That is a reasonable question.
The question was asked, “If you gave it away or disposed of it, what value was attached to it at that particular time?” Usually, they are not worth a thing. Usually, by the time furniture is ready for disposal at schools, it may look okay at first glance but it actually has no residual value because it has been depreciated over quite a number of years, so its value is actually nothing. It actually costs more money to take it somewhere for disposal, in a lot of cases, than it is worth, even if it is only halfway through the depreciation cycle. Their method of disposal has often been through Pickles Auctions. In some cases they have gone to places like the recycling and reuse areas at the tip. Sometimes they have just been made available for people to pick over, because they have no residual value.
He then gave a tiny tickle-up around the Revolve issue. He said that Revolve wanted to get their hands on this material. There was a sneaky implication that perhaps there was some incompetence, inefficiency, and maybe a little bit more skulduggery than that, around Revolve not being able to get hold of it; I do not know. But I thought, “Now we know where he has gone.” And that is sad.
The problem with the topic of Mr Smyth’s MPI today is that it did not give us or anyone else who has a reasonable level of education an opportunity to understand
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .