Page 4611 - Week 12 - Thursday, 15 October 2009
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Canberra. The Greens are more than happy to sit down and discuss with anybody in this chamber, and the minister in particular, how we can best achieve this.
When I saw that the minister was making a ministerial statement today, I assumed that the minister had been inspired by his overseas trip and also that he was going to come in today and present the government’s draft energy policy. I had hoped that today would be the day when we would finally see it. I had hoped that the minister would be announcing the beginning of the consultation period on the energy policy because it has been a long time coming, to be frank.
Again, digging into the archives today, I found the original energy policy discussion paper from March 2006. And here we are, in October 2009, and we are still waiting for the next draft. I accept that there are reasons for these delays, and I have had discussions with the minister about his concerns about earlier versions. But this version has on it as the by-line “reliable, responsible, renewable”. It clearly left off “timely”, because we still do not have an energy policy more than three years later. If we are going to talk about tackling emissions in the ACT, we need an energy policy.
The minister has also raised the ACT’s feed-in tariff and the extension of that feed-in tariff. We still have not seen the government’s discussion paper on this either. We have heard about how the government’s aspiration is to reach zero emissions, but we have not seen a roadmap of how they are going to get there either.
It brings me to my other favourite document in the series, weathering the change. This is a strategy from 2006 which the government said it was going to deliver for the ACT. I note that action 2 is to pursue carbon neutrality in government buildings, and that resource management plans were to be developed by all ACT government agencies and would be in place by 2009. Yet Ms Le Couteur and I—particularly Ms Le Couteur—extensively asked questions in the recent estimates process about where the government was up to and where departments were up to. If I recall correctly, we found, almost universally, that the answer to these questions was that departments were not even measuring their emissions, let alone reaching a point of carbon neutrality.
This brings me to thinking about where the ACT government is at. With respect to some of my criticisms today, I do not mean to be overly critical; I think the minister has developed some really interesting points today. But it is important to frame the context in which these comments were made.
Perhaps in the ACT government we need to look at strengthening the Department of the Environment, Climate Change, Energy and Water, because I think the minister is talking about the right sort of ideas to deliver for the ACT. Clearly, it is going to take a significant effort. It is also going to take a significant effort to push back against some of the other departments who are sceptical about these initiatives. I think that strengthening the minister’s department is an issue we may need to look at so that they have got the necessary capability to deliver these inspiring ideas that the minister has been subjected to on his international travels.
The other thing is that the next budget, delivered by the Treasurer next year, needs to be a real climate change budget—a budget that says that the ACT government has
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