Page 131 - Week 01 - Tuesday, 9 December 2008
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
At 6.00 pm, in accordance with standing order 34, the debate was interrupted. The motion for the adjournment of the Assembly having been put and negatived, the debate was resumed.
MR SESELJA: In the brief time that I have left, let me say that we have seen the attitude of Mr Hargreaves. He has no idea what sustainable industries are. We hope that that is not going to be the attitude of the government. We certainly believe that Canberra and the ACT have a real opportunity—it is an opportunity economically and environmentally—and we should seize that. We should not dwell too much on the costs, although there will be some initial costs. We should look at the long-term sustainability of our economy and the long-term sustainability of our environment. I think we are better placed than most jurisdictions to do that because of the unique nature of Canberra.
We look forward to being part of solution. We look forward to working with industry to make that happen. It does require will; it does require leadership; it does require more than just a dismissal of proposals that come for investment. We will look to support those as much as we can in opposition and we will have alternative policies to put in place in government.
MRS DUNNE (Ginninderra) (6.01): It is with great pleasure that I rise to speak on the matter of public importance, namely, the greening of the ACT economy, and I congratulate Ms Hunter for bringing this forward. I think that there is a renewed interest on behalf of the government, which I hope to see materialise into real and effective policies in this term, and I think the Greens and the Liberal opposition will keep the government accountable on this.
I think the history of the Stanhope government has been a sorry one on this matter and I have drawn members’ attention to this on a number of occasions. I think it is worth repeating at the beginning of this Assembly. In the 2004 election the ACT Labor government did not take one greenhouse, energy efficiency, solar policy to the election. Their entire environment policy was related to nature conservation.
On the other hand—and I think this was also a failing of the Liberal opposition—we took a whole range of policies in relation to energy efficiency and greenhouse but did not take a substantial policy in relation to nature conservation. That was a policy failing on our part.
There has been a bit of a change over the years. We saw in the last Assembly some work done by the Labor government. This was not executive-driven policy; this was policy mainly driven by Mr Gentleman. Mr Gentleman had a particular enthusiasm and what we are now extolling as world-leading feed-in tariffs was the work almost solely of Mr Gentleman.
There are some problems with that legislation and I expect that in the next little while we will have to see a little fix-up of that legislation. But it was no credit to the Stanhope government because, when Mr Gentleman first introduced his legislation, the Chief Minister was a sceptic in the same way as I was a sceptic in some ways.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .