Page 1551 - Week 04 - Thursday, 7 April 2011
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Recommendation 2 is a perennial favourite in slightly different terms. It is about the southern cemetery and looking at the full range of options there. It appears that the government is focusing particularly on a crematorium—as the committee heard, a very solid piece of work was done on a crematorium. That is good but it would be really useful if solid pieces of work were done on the other end-of-life options.
We would like to see something more about the financial impacts. We believe work has been done but it is not yet publicly available. The last debate was on the committee report about freedom of information. Information availability is an ongoing problem for all committees and for all MLAs. I very much hope, as a result of my motion yesterday and the committee report that Mrs Dunne has just tabled, that we will see some improvement on that.
The next area that we talked about was weeds. I notice that was talked about again by Mr Rattenbury in discussion on the report on Namadgi national park. We made two recommendations here—one about prioritisation in weed management and the other was the ACT government looking at ways of empowering and resourcing land care and park care groups in their weed control activities.
This is important for a number of reasons. The most bottom-line reason, I guess, is that there are a lot of people who are interested and enthusiastic enough to work in these areas. If the government can harness this energy and enthusiasm it is going to save the bottom line. The government simply does not have the resources to do weed control everywhere that it is needed in the ACT. People feel very positively about the natural areas that surround them. People love the bush capital which we are fortunate to live in, and there are a lot of people who would be prepared to put some effort into doing the right things with weeds. They just need a bit of help.
Next we move on to waste issues. We looked at a number of those, the first being expanding recycling services in public places. This is something the Greens have been talking about for years now. It was part of our agreement with the Labor Party, and we really would like to see the ACT government act on this recommendation. It is something that clearly the public think should happen. It is something which the government, in various guises, has talked positively about, and the committee’s report particularly noted the public place recycling in Exhibition Park. The committee heard that this was working well, but it has not been extended.
The other waste recommendation was about batteries and light globes. We did ask for information about what the government’s plans were with this. We understand that the government is considering it. We have asked for the government to provide an assessment to the Legislative Assembly of opportunities to provide household battery/light globe drop-off services. This is an area that I have been very concerned with.
The ACT Greens ran for quite a period of time a battery and light globe recycling service from our office because the ACT government did not run one. There is clearly a major need. It is toxic waste which is not properly being disposed of. I should also note that the Greens have put forward a budget bid for something along these lines. I
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