Page 804 - Week 03 - Tuesday, 8 March 2016

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Clean Up Australia Day

MS LAWDER (Brindabella) (5.05): I would like to take this opportunity today to talk about Clean Up Australia Day which took place over the weekend and to thank the thousands of volunteers around Australia who joined in the clean-up efforts to help clean our environment of thousands of tonnes of rubbish for Clean Up Australia Day.

Clean Up Australia Day has been around for 26 years now. Ian Kiernan famously started Clean Up Australia Day. Over 682,000 volunteers rallied around Australia this year. As a progress report late on Sunday night, there were about 7,117 locations across Australia that were being cleaned up. Up until this weekend, Australians had donated more than 31.2 million hours towards removing accumulated rubbish from their local communities through clean up Australia activities.

On Sunday I was down at Lake Tuggeranong with quite a large group of people who were cleaning up around the outskirts of the lake. I would like to thank all of those volunteers who took part on Sunday at Lake Tuggeranong. We have many outstanding people in Brindabella in my electorate who are only too happy to volunteer their time, and they make valuable contributions to our community and make our area a better place to live and work and play. They really deserve our thanks.

At the clean-up I went to at Lake Tuggeranong there were, I think, 46 people who turned up on Sunday morning, including a number of cub leaders and the sea scouts, and they filled approximately 50 bags of rubbish. At the end there was also a barbecue sponsored by the Tuggeranong Community Council. I would like to say thank you to the Tuggeranong Lake Carers for organising the clean up down there at Lake Tuggeranong, particularly Glenys, Beverly, Bill, Lesley and all the other people.

Initiatives like Clean Up Australia Day provide us with a great opportunity to really help make a difference in our local parks, lakes, bushlands and streets and help us to keep Canberra’s unique landscape places where plants, wildlife and people can thrive. According to the Clean Up Australia Day website, approximately 80 per cent of the rubbish that is picked up on Clean Up Australia Day is recyclable material. If only those people that dumped those bits of rubbish had put them into the recycling bins we would all be a lot better off. But as you well know, during Clean Up Australia Day the rubbish is sorted into general rubbish and recycling bags—the yellow bags are for recyclable materials and the white bags are for the others.

It was a great event down there at Lake Tuggeranong. It was a pretty hot morning, but congratulations to those people who turned up and helped. I look forward to joining the Lake Tuggeranong carers and others around the Tuggeranong area for their event again next year.

Canberra area theatre awards

MR COE (Ginninderra) (5.08): Madam Deputy Speaker, I rise tonight to congratulate and to acknowledge all those involved in the Canberra area theatre awards. The


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