Page 2222 - Week 06 - Friday, 27 June 2008
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there will be less idling, and therefore we will have less greenhouse gases.” It is a pretty long bow. It is a neat argument. It is a good argument. While you have grade-separated roads and things like that, people are not sitting at traffic lights and that is a greenhouse gas efficiency measure. But the idea that every new road is going to fix things up is drawing a long bow.
We have actually got the tree-driven initiatives in relation to the environment. Most of the environment package, as I said in the in-principle stage, relates to trees. There are trees; there is a forest; there is an arboretum; there are replacement trees; and I think there are more trees. All of this is important, but this essentially is an urban beautification process. These trees will die; they will fall down; and, in doing that, they will emit carbon. Just planting trees is not a carbon abatement process. There is much more to carbon abatement through forestation than just planting trees. It is a whole-of-lifecycle matter. The Chief Minister thinks that he can gloss over it by saying, “Look how much money there is for trees.”
In terms of sustainability, there is very little in this budget. There is the rebadging of a few programs and extending them a little bit. There is some new money but it is very small new money. The Chief Minister berated the opposition the other day for spending what he said was a small amount of money in their last budget, in 2001, on greenhouse matters. I pointed out to him that that was new money; there had been money in the past; and that money was accumulated, one on top of the other.
No-one says that that was enough. In hindsight, it was not enough. But the Chief Minister comes in here and says, “We have spent $240 million”—or a large sum of money—“on greenhouse gas reductions since we have come into this place.” Most of it is not that; it is the sort of thing that you can cobble together and say, “Can I in some way justify this as a sustainability measure and then count that towards my greenhouse gas reduction?” But it is not a coherent policy; it does not address the issues that we need to address; it does not seriously look at the problem and come up with solutions.
The only person in the government, it seems to me, who has seriously looked at the problem is Mr Gentleman. He came up with a part of a solution and it was an all right part of a solution, but a hell of a lot more work needs to be done on what Mr Gentleman tried to achieve the other day with the introduction of his feed-in tariff. It is a good start, but keep working on it, Mr Gentleman, because there is a lot more to do.
Mr Pratt touched on ACTION. Yes, the new network is better but it has still a long way to go. Yes, it is aimed at commuters, and a lot of people, vulnerable people who do not have access to other transport, have missed out. People who travel in the middle of the day are still having long waits between buses. There are improvements but there is still a long way to go. And until we have a much better process of bus priority and eventually a much more streamlined and seamless approach to public transport we will not make serious inroads into (a) providing the people of the ACT with a good service and (b) addressing our greenhouse gas emissions.
I cannot let the budget discussion of urban services close without some mention of the Albert Hall. I welcome the funding that has eventually materialised and had been
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