Page 3123 - Week 09 - Tuesday, 22 August 2017

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still waiting for master plans to be completed, heritage stakeholders, and even people being relocated from public housing along the Northbourne Avenue corridor. I hesitate to mark them out separately because to me they are just members of our community and will be disadvantaged just as much as anyone else in our community. They are us, and we are them.

Each of these groups that have been negatively impacted would have been better off if the government had gone out and sought more advice from stakeholders. There is no need for so many groups to be negatively impacted. It is an example, here in the budget, of the arrogance of the government. I started today by saying that good governance requires good consultation with the community, and I do hope that this government will take that on board.

MS LE COUTEUR (Murrumbidgee) (4.10): As I said on Tuesday, the Greens welcome many budget wins for our policy agenda. My colleague Minister Rattenbury will talk about some of those that are in the areas he has portfolio responsibility for, so I will talk about other things.

I spoke about the Suburban Land Agency this morning after the ministerial statement, so I will not repeat my concerns. On the lease variation charge, I very much share the concerns of Ms Lawder. Some modelling was needed for this, and some consultation. There is a real possibility that it is not going to work in a way which is contrary to a more compact city, to what is described as “the missing middle”, but is going to work in a way that discourages infill. And it possibly will not even raise the amount of money the government thinks it will.

I spoke about that last week when we talked about the Treasury budget item, because while this possibly should have been considered under planning, it actually was considered under Treasury. In estimates we asked ACTPLA how they had been involved in the modelling for this. There was a very simple answer: they were not involved at all.

I also will not go through at length the relevant recommendations of the estimates report. In general, yes, the recommendations of the estimates report are very sound, and it would be great if the government adopted them all. I will go through just a couple of things which I would particularly like to highlight out of the huge range of work that EPSDD does.

First is the energy efficiency rating review. I am very pleased about this. Back in the Seventh Assembly, the first group that came to lobby me was a bunch of people who wanted to talk to me about EER schemes. This review is a parliamentary agreement item.

The energy efficiency rating scheme in Canberra has a lot of problems, one of which, as with so many other things, is enforcement issues. Energy efficiency ratings are done. We do not have much enforcement to see that they are done correctly, and we certainly have no enforcement to see that what is energy efficiency rated is what is actually built. We have heard many stories about insulation that was not installed and


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