Page 1403 - Week 04 - Thursday, 26 March 2009
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green economy that would be underpinned by well-designed environmental policies that spur innovation and government measures that would contribute to creating and consolidating domestic markets or environmental technologies to succeed in global markets. With the right policy settings, we have an opportunity to secure environmental sustainability while securing jobs and industry well into the future.
The Greens believe that green jobs must be the centrepiece of a sustainable economy. As everyone now recognises, it is time for new thinking. The promotion and establishment of the new green economy will provide direction on how we can manage any future downturns while ensuring a sustainable and viable future. The Greens will be supporting the passage of this appropriation bill in order to support the local economy and provide some certainty to the residents and businesses of the ACT.
In the government’s response to the public accounts committee’s report, many of the recommendations have been noted, and there are a few that have been agreed. There are just a couple that I would like to bring attention to, and one of these is around the issue of the bill posting silos and the recommendation from the committee to hold off on those because the planning committee was actually having an inquiry and looking into where those bill posting silos might be located throughout the community. I note that the government has responded by saying that they will not be holding off on that particular part of the appropriation bill, and I guess it does raise a little bit of an issue around a bit of disrespect for the inquiry that is going on by the planning committee at the moment.
Another issue I note is that there were questions asked by the public accounts committee in relation to the cost of each silo. There really was not a clear response as to whether the department really knew how much each of these silos would cost and, therefore, how many there would be. So I just note my disappointment that there has not been a holding off on waiting for that inquiry to be completed by the planning committee, because I feel that that would have provided some very good information, some important information, about where those bill posting silos could have been placed. So that was one of the issues that I did want to raise.
There is another point, and that is about the recommendation that has just been referred to, in fact, by Mr Smyth around having some breakdown on some of these projects about what is being spent on materials and what is being spent on wages and so on. I note in the government’s response that they say that they contract this sort of thing out and that they have no idea. I do find that a little bit hard to understand, because when you are going out for a contract, that is part of your negotiations. You get some idea of cost, because you would want to make an assessment about whether they are overcharging or whether they have the balance of that contract right or what they are offering for the amount of money that you are putting on the table.
So again, I think that that was quite a reasonable recommendation that was put forward by the public accounts committee. It would give us a greater understanding to be able to have a greater level of transparency around contracts and the negotiation of those contracts, but also, I guess, a greater idea around the jobs that may be saved.
This was never put forward as a job creation package, and so the Greens are in no way saying that this very modest local initiatives package should be about jobs creation; it
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