Page 2799 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 29 June 2010
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
It is referring, of course, to the waste budget here. The review also said that government budget data had considerably under-forecast the demand for forward capital expenditure in waste management. I fear that this is still the case. I would suggest that with our historically high residential diversion rate, the government is not prioritising waste because it can still say that our diversion rate remains comparatively high compared to other states.
But really what we are talking about in the budget is not what we have done in the past; it is what we are going to do in the future. A cost-benefit analysis of our approach to waste, as was done in that 2008 review, shows that by aiming for 90 per cent or greater of waste diverted from landfill will bring the greatest net benefits into the future. It is all detailed in this independent review.
The government’s target, however, has been 75 per cent for many years. However positively this budget flags it, it will increase to 80 per cent by 2014-15 when the new waste strategy comes into place. This is a positive, although modest, increase. But I guess the concern that we have, having not yet been able to see the waste strategy, is what is going to happen to this document.
Among many things, what will happen to the diverted waste? Is it going to be reused? Is it going to be recycled? Will it be burnt to produce energy? Even more worryingly, we are seeing an increase of the total quantity of waste generated in the ACT every year. The question I ask the government is this: what are you doing to reduce that total quantity of waste being generated in the ACT? What are we doing to stop that increasing every year?
While Mr Stanhope said he would have loved to provide additional significant funding for waste, he did provide additional significant funding in other areas. During our discussions about the budget, Mr Stanhope revealed that there is currently $186 million in new road contracts. So the question we should ask, I guess, is: are all these roads necessary? Could any of them have been postponed, even for a short period of time, so that we can set up some of the initiatives that I have been talking about with waste that will carry us into a prosperous, sustainable future, and more environmentally and economically sound future?
If we look again at the $186 million currently out in new road contracts and we calculate the costs of transport initiatives in this year’s budget, this provides some interesting figures. Initiatives that could loosely be termed as sustainable, such as bus infrastructure, pedestrian initiatives, transit ways, lighting and cycling total about $40 million. On the other hand, the funding for road upgrades, intersection upgrades, road extensions, widening roads and new roads comes in at $74 million, which is almost double. What that is really saying is that we are spending about twice as much money on roads as we are spending on sustainable transport infrastructure.
This is not good for the future. We know that there are a lot of problems with locking in reliance on roads and car travel. Last week’s Sunday Herald even had a paper which documented new research. It shows that living within half a kilometre from a major road is bad for your health because of the connections to asthma, lung and heart-related disease.
Also, we are well aware of the issues related to active transport and health. We know that while Canberra may be a comparatively well-exercising part of Australia, we do
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video