Page 4579 - Week 11 - Tuesday, 19 October 2010
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science that says that we should accept anything lower than that 40 per cent target. Indeed, as I said earlier, the science is compelling that we should be taking stronger action.
The Liberals’ bill has taken much of its structure from a similar piece of legislation in South Australia. There are some aspects of this bill, and indeed that South Australian legislation, that are indeed useful. In drafting our amendments, we did review all of the bills and the legislation that are around, including Mr Seselja’s bill, to draw on what we thought were the best provisions for ensuring that the ACT had the best legislation. However there were some problems in the drafting of Mr Seselja’s bill. To name a couple, we felt that the reporting periods for the targets were unworkable and that the electricity efficiency target did not discriminate between electricity that was generated through renewable energy and that not.
Having noted those problems, we did not overly focus our attention on Mr Seselja’s bill, and, as I said, we were not clear that it was going to be brought on again. But I did want to offer those few observations before returning to the government’s bill.
The government’s bill, the bill that the Greens will be supporting, must be seen for what it is—a policy direction, a measurement tool and a reporting and accountability mechanism. It is important that we get this right, because this is the piece of legislation that the community will use to hold the government to account on its actions. If reporting standards are not included, we have no foundation on which to base our assessment of how effective the government is being. And without meaningful community engagement, this bill will just gather dust on the shelf. We absolutely cannot let that happen.
What this bill does is not wave a magic wand. We have much work to do now to put the policies and legislation in place to drive change. There may be some hard decisions along this path. There may also be some unpopular decisions. If doing this was going to be easy, every community around the planet would have done it by now. Some of it is easy, some of it is common sense, and much of it comes with benefits. But some of it will be tough. It will be interesting to see what role leaders in our community play—whether they will play a constructive role in meeting these challenges head on or whether they will, at every opportunity, take swipes at the government for their actions.
I am not averse to taking a swipe at the government if I think it is warranted. And I suspect that we will have some robust debates over the next couple of years about how to implement the goals in this bill. But that is very different from condemning every action that the government proposes to deal with climate change. And it is very different from playing easy, populist cards about rising electricity prices and pressure on family budgets.
The reality is that none of us in this place enjoy the idea of rising costs and putting people under more financial stress than they already have. But we must also step back and take a long-term view of this—look at what needs to be done and look at how we can best achieve it while protecting those people who are the most vulnerable in our community. We must look to the opportunities that such a situation can offer us and not just focus our attention on the costs or on the negatives.
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