Page 2473 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 13 August 2014
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Greens parliamentary agreement. Recently we have had the administrative arrangements change quite significantly and now have our sixth minister. Yet there is still no action on the single nature conservation agency.
The Chief Minister in her own words said:
I do not think it is the best way of dealing with changes to the administrative orders to change them a bit here and then a few months later change them a bit there. The approach I have taken is that this work falls into the broader work we are looking at across government because there are, outside the environment and nature conservation, other areas in which I believe some administrative changes need to be made.
If we look at the Chief Minister’s words there, we can almost assume that this proposal for a single nature conservation agency has been scrapped or at least will not come into effect any time in the near future, because administrative arrangements have recently been changed. Ministers were appointed and portfolios shuffled, directorates moved and renamed, and there is still no action on the single nature conservation agency.
Given the Chief Minister quite fairly does not believe these things should be done ad hoc, and that changes in administrative arrangements should occur at once and not here and there, the fact that it was not done makes us turn to the question of why. Is it that Minister Corbell is trying to out-green the Greens and does not want to hand over his beloved environment portfolio?
By the same token, Minister Rattenbury, the sole defender of the Greens in this building, does not want to forgo responsibility he has for environmental functions because he would otherwise, perhaps, be known as a minister for roads, which would not sit well on his shoulders, and without becoming the minister for the new single agency.
Perhaps we find ourselves in a deadlock. Unfortunately, as we well know the Labor government only holds power in the ACT with the support of Minister Rattenbury. If he does not want to give up the functions of environmental management in his portfolio, the government cannot really make him, can they? It is a bit of a pickle, Madam Speaker.
Logically we now have an Environment and Planning Directorate. Surely it could all fall under there with the minister, Mr Gentleman. The government would probably respond by saying that we, the Canberra Liberals, have advocated so far for it to be in TAMS. We have advocated for it to be in Environment and Sustainable Development. Now we are saying something different again. Mea culpa, mea culpa.
The point is that it should be a single conservation agency, no matter where it sits. I urge the government to come clean today. If the single nature conservation agency is not going ahead, say so. Vote against the motion; take it off the table. But stop leaving the community groups and the wider community who are concerned about the environment in limbo.
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