Page 248 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 7 March 2007
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geographic spread of vector-borne, water-borne and food-borne pests and diseases. While the ACT is expected to have little change in total annual rainfall, there are expected to be more intense storm events. Greater runoff from storms and higher evaporation from overall higher temperatures will lead to less water being available for consumption. There is a predicted decrease of up to 20 per cent in the ACT’s Cotter and Googong catchments.
Climate change will impact on health, agriculture, water availability, the natural environment and urban planning. This government recognises the threats and the need to take actions to reduce our greenhouse emissions, as well as to adapt to the changes that will occur. However, this is a challenge the whole community must embrace, as it cannot be addressed by the government alone. The recently released Stern report, which was commissioned by the UK treasury, identified that climate change will have significant effects on the economy and all basic needs of societies. While stabilising emissions will have costs these are manageable but further delay would be dangerous and much more costly.
We clearly have an inescapable responsibility to future generations to address the problems now. The ACT is an active participant and supporter of action at the national level. However, a truly national approach has been limited by the commonwealth’s unwillingness to ratify the Kyoto protocol or to commit to any longer term target for reductions.
I need to put on the record the extent to which the ACT has jurisdictional authority, as it were, to sign up to the Kyoto protocol. Kyoto is in fact a compact between nations, not parts of nations or smaller parts of them, and it applies its wording to industrial activity and land clearing, neither of which we have in the ACT. That is not to suggest, however, that the ACT does not fully support the principles behind the Kyoto agreement. The burden of responding to climate change largely has been left to state and territory jurisdictions, individual businesses and community groups.
Australia’s state and territory governments, as a group, have acknowledged the existence and pressing nature of the climate change problem. The difficulty has been getting the commonwealth to the table. The Prime Minister’s late-life conversion is welcome but it has left us playing catch-up. On the question of our greenhouse gas emissions, it saddens me that, even with all the vigour, venom and vehemence Dr Foskey projected her voice and pushed the case for climate change strategy, she did not acknowledge some of the leadership things the ACT government and communities have been doing.
DR FOSKEY: That is your job.
MR HARGREAVES: Dr Foskey says that that is my job and I am happy to shoulder that. However, if she truly purports to represent the community that she says she does, she ought at least to tell the complete picture and not give us those little pieces of cherry pickings that she chooses to use to support her argument. I see no acknowledgment from the Greens of this government’s application of 23 per cent green power for its own uses, second only to Tasmania, which is a hydro state. I see no acknowledgment of our commitment to put CNC buses on the road. I have heard nothing from Dr Foskey about Mr Corbell’s move to put cycle lanes in this city, or the
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