Page 2113 - Week 06 - Thursday, 26 June 2008
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budget. Instead, we see the ACT government supporting an irrational mix of strategies, including feed-in tariffs, gas-fired power stations wherever ActewAGL might want them, extra money into roads, new suburbs without public transport planning, and a general reliance on a national energy framework which we have practically no say over. We have not even set any renewable energy targets yet.
It is not as if this plan would have to be developed from scratch; there are more than enough ideas on the table. The town of Woking in the UK has already made the shift away from energy purchase from the national grid to more efficient local generation, and now those plans are to be taken up in London.
To put something appropriate for the ACT in place, I would like to see the ACT government establish an energy commission. And that would have to start from the Chief Minister’s Department. After all, it set up the Schools Commission at the end of 2006. That commission reported in April this year and its recommendations can now be seen in elements of this budget, in areas such as industry, education, family support, housing and industrial relations. An energy commission could and should be one of this year’s key projects. It would draw on local and national expertise, including planners, community advocates and well-placed people from the relevant industries and it would look at current and future energy use in our buildings and transport. Given that Canberrans’ energy use is, on average, 40 per cent higher than the average Australian’s, there is plenty of work to be done right here in this city.
The commission would map out the foreseeable risks such as peak oil and the increasing cost of energy as we move away from brown coal. It would develop a plan to make us resilient in the face of these shocks, including a move away from reliance on the car as the only transport option for most people and steps to reduce our giant heating and air-conditioning bills.
I first raised the issue of adapting our car-based city to a declining oil supply and climate change in the Assembly in 2005. In response, the government made much of its energy policy, supposedly in development. Since then we have seen increasing traffic problems, cuts to our public transport system and conflict over a giant gas-fired power station but no policy or strategy to address the underlying issues. The failure of the government to articulate such a comprehensive approach in this budget is a stark and obvious failure.
On public sector management, I note the investment in programs for accountability in government and for building and maintaining capacity in the ACT public service. There are some particular challenges that confront us in the ACT which this government does not always want to acknowledge. It seems to me that the government came up short on accountability in regard to making an appropriate site available to the ActewAGL power station and data centre proposal.
Perhaps more importantly, that sequence of events cast a light on this government’s approach to freedom of information. Indeed, given that fish rots from the head, the CMD leadership on FOI is salutary. It was clear, from the FOI decision letters that accompanied the opposition’s FOI requests on the gas-fired power plant, FOI officers in some agencies are not upholding the spirit of the act which, as Mrs Dunne explained yesterday, is intended to facilitate the release of as much information as possible within the constraints of the act.
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