Page 514 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 16 February 2005
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competitor is not. It is like a sense of civic pride: “I’ve got a five-bluebell rating for my house and my neighbour only has a four-bluebell rating” or whatever.
The most important element is to find the means so that people can actually afford to do these things. You cannot just come in off the street and say, “We are going to introduce BASIX,” which, by the way, does not actually work very well yet. It may work well one day, but, if you talk to people in local government in New South Wales where it is implemented, you will find that there are a number of problems with it. This is not to say that BASIX will not work in the future, that we will not succeed in ironing out the problems, but I do not want to commit the people of the ACT to a system that is currently flawed, where an efficient operation of the system is not yet established and the added costs to building and development of which are unquantifiable, without a bit more information.
We know the system does not work. We know that the roll-out of BASIX for multiunit developments in the Sydney metropolitan area has been put on hold because there are problems with the system, and that is the reason why we, as responsible legislators, should not be going holus-bolus in support of the BASIX system. The BASIX system has merit. The industry recognises that BASIX has merit, the planners recognise that BASIX has merit, the opposition recognises the merit in BASIX and I suspect that even the government, who are absolute troglodytes when it comes to energy efficiency, recognises that there are merits in the BASIX system. But we should not be signing up to a system that is so unproved, that still has so many problems with it, and we should not be signing up to a system that imposes huge imposts on people in the ACT without the means of supporting it.
I refer to one of the other innovative approaches advocated by the Liberals before the previous election, which is the Greenbank loan scheme and which was highly commended by people across the Green movement. The Conservation Council at one stage said that it was exceedingly innovative and it hoped that whichever government won the election would take it up and implement it. I lay down the challenge to the Minister for Environment, who before the election pooh-poohed it and said, “We cannot do that because we are not a banking organisation and we’d have to get all these approvals to do it”. What rubbish! What absolute rubbish! Again, on matters of the environment, the environment minister is laughably and alarmingly out of touch with what is needed.
We cannot support the motion that Dr Foskey has brought forward today, however well intentioned it is. We do not support things just because they are well intentioned. We have to think about the implications of them. Unfortunately, I think the amendments that the government propose do not go far enough and I criticise them for being self-congratulatory. There is more to being in government than walking around saying, “Aren’t we good? Aren’t we fantastic?” Beating yourself on the chest does not actually make good policy. There is much more that this government can do but they have failed to do because they lack imagination in this area, and they are hidebound by convention. They cannot think outside the square. They say they will not adopt the Greenbank loan scheme, which would actually make it possible for people to afford these innovations. They will not do anything to educate people about how they can make their lives (a) better, (b) more comfortable and (c) cheaper, which they could do if some of these schemes were implemented.
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