Page 3103 - Week 08 - Thursday, 25 June 2009
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looked after as well as they should be. Of course, when we have seen a lot of our urban street trees being allowed to die because they have not been watered, you do question the spending.
But putting those concerns aside, it is not being up-front to suggest that what this was about was a climate change measure and to lump that into your climate change strategy and pretend that that somehow is a major part of it. It is certainly a major part of the spend. It is a major part of the spend that is claimed towards the measure, but I think it is very questionable what the actual effect of it is. We saw that with the carbon sequestration policy today.
I also want to say a few words about the no waste policy. I believe it was this minister who stated that no waste remains the broad objective of the territory. If that is the case, then I think much more needs to be done. I think no waste was a fairly visionary policy. I think we can compare no waste to, say, the zero net emissions target. I think that no waste had a plan. They always knew the last part of the plan was going to be hard, that the last five or 10 per cent was going to be particularly difficult. But there was a plan and we saw massive gains as a result of putting that strategy in place. What we have seen is a real stagnating over the last several years. I think in some years we have seen it actually go backwards. Then we have even seen some of the targets go down, to match the poorer performance.
It was interesting—and it was not in this portfolio, obviously—that this was also discussed with the Minister for Territory and Municipal Services. He cited asbestos. The Chief Minister, of course, is backing away from no waste and he cited asbestos: “There is no way of recycling asbestos and therefore we cannot get to no waste.” But when asked to account for how much asbestos makes up of the overall waste of the ACT, that question was not answered there. There are a lot of questions on notice to go through. I have not seen whether that has come back. It might have been in the large pile that was delivered this afternoon. But I do not imagine that asbestos makes up a large proportion of waste going to landfill in the ACT.
It seemed like a bit of a smokescreen to hide the fact that we are not moving towards those targets. In fact, we have stagnated for some time. That is disappointing, given how far we had come. And of course, looking at things like green waste recycling and how we do that better has to be part of how we get there.
We saw also the issue of office smart and business smart programs. I think there are a number of worthy initiatives there to encourage recycling but, clearly, that is only going to be a very small part of the equation.
The issue of plastic bags, I think, was an area of concern for us. In making this agreement on plastic bags, the government clearly had not done its homework. The government and the Greens, perhaps, had not done their homework in looking into the issue of whether it is constitutional. It would appear to me that the minister was a bit cagey about it. I have not seen that answer to that question on notice, which I think Mr Rattenbury was referring to, but in the initial answers it was a little bit cagey and I suspected that the advice was pretty strong that it is not constitutional and that the plastic bag levy will not go ahead. But it does call this into question.
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