Page166 - Week 01 - Thursday, 3 December 2020
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technology allow us, we should seek to meet those emissions goals as soon as possible.
Look at the advice that is given about carbon budgets, as has, for example, been provided to the ACT govt by the Climate Council. It talks about the notion of there being an overall carbon budget and the earlier you make more reductions the more time you have got to deal with those harder sectors. So we should be looking to make those early wins as soon as possible.
Certainly the ACT government has been very successful in cutting our emissions through the move to 100 per cent renewable electricity. Gas now is more than 20 per cent of the ACT’s emissions; so we do need to begin to phase out fossil fuel gas in the ACT as one of our larger sources of emissions.
The parliamentary and governing agreement contains a number of commitments to deal with gas phase-out, and that includes the commitment to end gas connections in new suburbs from 2021-22 and from infill developments from 2023. There are a couple of steps. We have also committed to, as Minister Berry spoke about earlier, new schools being built as all-electric. The new expansion of the hospital is being done as an all-electric development and of course there is the commitment that the new Molonglo development in the western part of the city will be an all-electric commercial centre. There are a number of important initiatives being moved forward by the government.
MR BRADDOCK: Minister, why is there a difference between the timing of banning gas connections in greenfields versus infill developments by 2021-22 for greenfields and 2023-24 for infill developments?
MR RATTENBURY: These are policies that are about making the first important step. The first thing we can do is to stop making the problem worse, and ending new connections means that we are not putting in infrastructure that will become stranded assets that the community will have to pay for but we will not get a full life out of. That is the policy purpose behind ending the new connections.
When it comes to greenfields, it does have an earlier time frame because we believe it is more easily and readily implemented. We have already seen it with the Ginninderry development, which sought the government’s support to actually be a gas-free development. For infill developments, given the planning and design issues, we believe it will take a little longer. But that is not to stop a developer actually looking forward and making the decision to end gas connections even sooner than that. I would certainly encourage developers, whether they be new suburb developers or building developers, to be looking to the future.
We already see a lot of Canberrans disconnecting their own gas supply because they know it is both environmentally sound and it is proving to be very economically sound for them as well in removing that connection fee that they are otherwise paying every year.
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