Page 3235 - Week 11 - Tuesday, 13 November 2007

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What we have had as a result of that is year on year of failure to act. The only action we saw was the action taken by the then minister for energy, Mr Quinlan, to introduce the scheme that we are amending today. As I and others said at the time, it was a good start but it was not the whole thing: the day-to-day strategy, the way we live our lives inside the ACT, was not going to be markedly affected by this scheme and there needed to be much more done.

What we saw from the Stanhope government was, as I said, a throwing out of the existing greenhouse strategy. For some year or more, we in the ACT had no greenhouse strategy. At a time when everyone on the government benches was wringing their hands and the Greens were ringing their hands about how important this issue was, the Stanhope government was silent and dumb on the issue.

Then we had the fizzer greenhouse strategy—the Stanhope government’s greenhouse strategy. It is an absolute fizzer. It is one of the elements, the traits, of the Stanhope government: you have to throw out everything that came before and cast it anew; you have to reinvent the wheel over and over again. In a small jurisdiction, that is not often very cost effective. We have seen this in the past, with the waste of government activity in many areas.

Today we have a small movement. What we are doing today does not in any way improve our greenhouse performance. It changes the date and I suppose it gives people an opportunity to speak about the things which we feel are important, but we need to make it perfectly clear that the commonwealth government intends to set up a clean energy target and to have an emissions trading scheme in operation by 1 January 2010. The clean energy target will ensure that, by 2020, 30,000 gigawatt hours of electricity generated will have no or low emissions.

You also have to remember the groundbreaking work that has been done by the Australian government over the years, which has already set us up fairly well—though not as well as it could have. On occasions, we have dropped the ball and not carried through. One of the things that we have to remember is that the mandatory renewable energy targets which were introduced in 2001 were groundbreaking at the time and world-first. It is a matter of great regret to me and others on this side that, when those targets expired in 2004, they were not renewed. It took some time to get that policy kick-started again. It is good work and it is work that should be progressed. That work will underpin the national trading scheme when it comes into operation in 2010.

The fact that the national scheme will come into operation in 2010 means that, for the most part, the discussions we are having today are unnecessary. I question why the government has brought this forward today. It may have been considered vaguely necessary back in March but, as a result of decisions made through September, it is completely and utterly unnecessary to change the date at this stage. It will not make any difference one way or the other to the effectiveness of the operation of the scheme, which will automatically come to an end on 1 January 2010.

MR STANHOPE (Ginninderra—Chief Minister, Treasurer, Minister for Business and Economic Development, Minister for Indigenous Affairs, Minister for the


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