Page 3757 - Week 09 - Tuesday, 24 August 2010
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
I would like to make a comment in relation to the weathering the change action plan. It was about opt in and opt out. We did not have the choice about whether you get power on the board. You did not get a chance to say, “No, no. I will stay with the kerosene heater, thanks very much.” It is on, and we all use it. That means that we are having to opt out of using really dirty electricity. If people are saying, “I do not want to use this stuff; I want to opt into the green scheme,” but they are not doing that because of the cost, that is because there are not enough people buying the stuff. If we reverse the idea, so that you have to opt out of it, then people will say, “Okay then; I can’t be bothered. I will stay in.” That would keep the price down, I would hope. To me, we really ought not to have a choice.
If I had my choice and I was king of the world, I would go down to Yallourn in Victoria and I would fill the hole in. But it would take all of the dirt in Tasmania to fill that hole. It is huge and it is filthy. The people in the ACT would love it if they did not have any dependence on brown coal with electricity at all. An opt-in, opt-out scheme is the way in which we can attack that.
I also want to make a comment about recommendation 4, the ICRC evaluation comments. I draw people’s attention to them. One of the things that we discussed in the committee and with Mr Baxter was that we need to have an agreed evaluation and an agreed formula against which we can measure our progress over the years. One of the things that struck me was that what was missing in the conversation was having a unit of measure that we can use.
We all know that we have got units of measure for electricity, water and all the rest of it, but we do not have a unit of measure about the environment. The conversation was around “we did not have units of measure to tell us the value of water in the catchment years ago, but that was developed, because really clever minds got together and developed a unit of measure”. We should be doing exactly the same thing when we are measuring the effect on our greenhouse gas emission abatement and all of the other things that we attack—climate change in the ACT.
When you come up with a formula, you need some units of measure. Units of measure usually have components. We have already got units of measure for things like water, gases and all the rest of it. They can be put together by a very bright academic mind to develop a unit of measure that we can use to start comparing ourselves with interstate jurisdictions.
What we do here in the ACT is completely different from what happens in other parts of the country. It is a pointless exercise to compare our achievements with those of Victoria, which is, in my view, the major contributor to dirty electricity and greenhouse gas emissions. We do not have a huge rural sector which contributes to it. We do not have factories belching out smoke. In fact, we have an urban forest. We are probably the best jurisdiction in terms of tackling climate change. Whether it is by design or by accident, I do not care; it is actually working. We need to make sure that, if we ever introduce manufacturing in the ACT, it is clean, green manufacturing, not dirty, smoke-belching factories dependent upon brown electricity.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video