Page 652 - Week 02 - Thursday, 20 February 2020
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the environment is important. Here in the ACT the Hall cemetery contains some very rare and endangered plants, notably the Tarengo leek orchid, which is extremely rare, being found in only five sites across Australia. The Hall cemetery is the only place where it occurs in the ACT. Because of this the authority does not mow the grass in spring or early autumn so that the plants can flower and seed.
The environment is also the major reason that the Greens and I support natural burials. Cremation, by its nature, leads to gaseous pollution. However, the major environmental impact of conventional burials is the decades and then centuries of lawn maintenance and lawn mowing. Natural burials allow our bodies to become part of our natural environment. They are normally put in areas of native vegetation, which almost certainly will not require mowing and almost certainly will not require a lot of human intervention in their maintenance. In the long run and the short run, they are usually cheaper than conventional burials. I am therefore very disappointed to learn today that there will not be any natural burial plots included in stage 1 of the southern memorial park.
I will now talk about the objective of sustainable financial management. At present burial sites in the ACT are perpetual sites, so the ACT cemeteries authority, which manages them, has an unending financial liability to maintain the site. In his tabling speech the minister said that “the territory has an unfunded liability for future maintenance of facilities in the tens of millions of dollars”. This liability was accumulated when interest rates were higher, the climate was less extreme, there was more space and more burials were being conducted. All of these things made the financial life of the ACT cemeteries authority easier.
I cannot see, however, that this bill will actually address funding this liability. Certainly, it does not appear to do that. And I am not at all sure that it in fact deals with the long-term funding issues. What we can say is that it does simplify the financial arrangements. There will only be one trust, instead of a trust for each location, and that trust is purely for long-term maintenance. That is a simplification and a good thing.
One option which has been explored to reduce the perpetual liability is to sell burial sites as “renewable tenure”. In 2017 the Standing Committee on Environment and Transport and City Services inquired into the management of cemeteries and related facilities. One of its recommendations was as follows:
The Committee recommends that a review of the Cemeteries and Crematoria Act 2003 be undertaken to ascertain the feasibility and financial basis for adopting a renewable tenure scheme to replace the prevailing tenure provisions applying to ACT cemeteries.
An awful lot of the other recommendations fell out of that major recommendation. Renewable tenure addresses the financial issues of cemeteries because you do not have a right to the plot forever; you have to renew it. Most cemeteries across the world do not have perpetual tenure. I understand that even in jurisdictions where it appears that there is perpetual tenure, generally it is only for 99 years. In Australia, most jurisdictions have moved to renewable tenure.
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