Page 453 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 28 June 1989
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Will we leave our children with an environment depleted of trees, with an atmosphere polluted by emissions from wood stoves or cars, with lead pollution and the incredible damage that that can do? Will we leave our children with an attitude that they are part of the environment? Are we prepared to learn from our Aboriginal forebears, if I can call them that in terms of Australia, about living at one with nature and at one with the world?
Can we manage to do that and still retain our standard of living? Those are the sorts of questions that we are looking at, and our Committee on Conservation, Heritage and Environment needs to address them. With that in mind, I commend this motion to the house.
MRS GRASSBY (Minister for Housing and Urban Services) (10.46): I welcome this motion. I am quite sure that Mr Moore has read the ALP policy. If he has read it, he will have taken note of the motions that were passed at our conference this weekend, and I am sure he will find that pretty well every word that is in his motion has been in our policy. It is not something that we woke up one day and decided to write. This is a policy that we have had for many, many years, because the ALP, not only of the ACT but of Australia, has always stood for the environment and the people. So it is no news to us. I have been living with this, as a member of the ALP, for 35 years of my life.
A member: What about woodchipping?
MRS GRASSBY: I think we are dealing with the ALP and the ACT at the moment. I would be quite happy to deal with woodchipping at some other time. I would like to go through some of the things that Mr Moore said. It is all very fine to say we should be using all electricity, but I wonder whether he realises that most of our electricity comes from New South Wales. Unfortunately, nowadays this is driven by coal, and if we were to use a lot more electricity we would be causing a lot more problems to New South Wales.
As we respect our neighbours - and I hope we shall go on doing so - we have to think a little bit more about this and understand that we do not have any right, while we are living very nicely, to pollute some other State. So when we look at electricity we have to think a little bit more about that.
I would also like to look at solar hot water systems in this respect. They are all wonderful; I have one myself, and I think very highly of solar hot water systems. But I can tell Mr Moore that during the winter, even when I am in the house on my own - and they tell me there is enough water for five people - I have to boost it nearly all winter with electricity. On cold and cloudy nights, the boost on electricity is unbelievable. I understand from ACTEW that we are using enormous amounts of electricity. This is due to the fact that solar hot water and heating systems have to be boosted.
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