Page 2221 - Week 06 - Friday, 27 June 2008
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and squash them into one again. And there is no capacity for rapid merging. We have created a situation where, through the mismanagement of the Stanhope government over seven years, the commute time for the average Canberran has doubled.
We talk about work-life balance. Most of my constituents are spending twice as much time in their cars or in the buses as they used to. (Second speaking period taken.) To give an example of this, my husband, to whom I have been married for 28 years, the real one, pointed out to me the other day that the Xpresso, the cutely named Xpresso, service from the Belconnen interchange to the Woden interchange in the morning takes the same time as any of the 300 services to go from Belconnen to Woden, that is, 26 minutes. Then, in the afternoon, the return journey is 14 minutes. And that is entirely because of the congestion on the GDE.
ACTION buses have to factor in an extra 12 minutes for a journey to get the Xpresso bus through the GDE. A 14-minute journey becomes a 26-minute journey, depending on the time of the day. And that goes to show that the system does not work, and it is about time that this government did something to fix it. It should never have been like this, but the government needs to admit that they made a mistake and get on and fix it.
There are other issues. The $850,000 feasibility study for a new landfill site is one. It is of course inevitable that we are going to have to have a look for a new site for landfill, and it is an issue that is facing municipalities and authorities across the country. Mr Gentleman, Ms Porter and I had a discussion with Veolia at the old Woodlawn mine recently and we heard about the pressure on landfills in Sydney and how most of those were coming to the end of their useful life. The Mugga Lane tip will inevitably come to the end of its useful life. I hope that the $850,000 is used wisely to come up with an alternative that is in the best interests of the ACT.
But while we are doing that, we should be looking at a whole range of things to reduce the amount of stuff that is going to landfill. Mr Hargreaves has pointed out some things about tyre recycling and trying to improve the recycling industries, but the thing is: we have not addressed the waste stream at the beginning. We are still playing footsies at environment protection ministers conferences about packaging covenants and it is about time, as a country, we bit the bullet about packaging covenants. There is still the failure of the Stanhope government to do anything about domestic putrescibles waste, let alone commercial putrescibles waste.
Dr Foskey, I think yesterday, dwelt on the fact that there is no energy policy and, if we had an energy policy, we might not be in the parlous situation we are in in relation to the much moved gas-fired power station. If we had an energy policy, I hope that we would have more success in siting a solar farm than we did with the gas-fired power station.
There are elements of the budget which of course the Chief Minister extolled as greenhouse measures—the where will we play? Suddenly growing grass or actually putting down artificial turf seems to be a measure to cut our greenhouse gas emissions. But the best one—and I liked it; while this is important, let us not call it a greenhouse gas efficiency measure—is new roads as a greenhouse gas efficiency measure. The government says, “If we have more roads, there will probably be less congestion,
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