Page 3227 - Week 11 - Tuesday, 13 November 2007
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global action, the kind of action, I would suggest, that governments bring into place at times of war.
I am exasperated that it is proposed for this scheme to continue until 2020 with the existing benchmarks. This legislation had a greenhouse gas emission reduction from 2005 to 2006 of 4.4 per cent, and then from 2006 to 2007 of a further 4.8 per cent. There are no further decreases necessary according to this legislation before us today. The benchmarks are set from now until 2012 at a flat 7.27 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent of greenhouse gas emissions per head of ACT population.
Extending that benchmark until 2020 is not a strategy, it is status quo, and status quo in terms of greenhouse gas production is really an increase to the load currently borne by our atmosphere. Woe betide the planet if that is the best we can do. Actually, it is worse than status quo. Given that the ACT government’s own projections show that the ACT population is expected to increase by 12 per cent over the next 15 years, the government is planning around an increase of the ACT population to 500,000 by 2030. Given that these benchmarks are based on a per capita basis, the ACT can abide by the scheme’s benchmarks and still have a large net increase in greenhouse gas emissions. This, Mr Speaker, is the crux of the problem.
The ACT only has about 1.7 per cent of Australia’s population, and yet we emit around five per cent of Australia’s greenhouse gases. Frankly, this is an embarrassment. Even the government’s own greenhouse discussion paper last year stated that per capita consumption of electricity is increasing at a rate significantly higher than population and at rates above the national average, and greenhouse gas emissions relating to energy use, particularly electricity, are increasing.
So what is this scheme abating, exactly? When this legislation was introduced in 2004, New South Wales and the ACT were leading the way in Australia. Now the other states have caught up and added their own initiatives, and we are lagging. I note that, at the time, my Greens predecessor, Kerrie Tucker, proposed an amendment to the bill to ensure that the benchmarks would be reviewed after three years. For reasons unknown to me, this was not supported. If that review had occurred in the context of the latest science—and that review would have occurred this year, Mr Speaker—I cannot imagine that members of the government could stand there with a straight face and support this legislation and say that it is an effective means of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
I fear that the benchmarks in this bill are so low that they are meaningless, and my amendment, which has been circulated, seeks to rectify this. So little has changed in terms of government action and policy that I could repeat Ms Tucker’s speech from 2004 and it would still be entirely appropriate.
Modelling by the Total Environment Centre showed that to truly achieve emissions five per cent below 1990 level—which is what our greenhouse target should be based on, not 2000 levels—the benchmark should drop annually until it reaches 5.85 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions per head, considerably below the 7.27 tonnes provided for in this bill.
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