Page 5057 - Week 12 - Tuesday, 26 October 2010
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come up and the policy is developed and the minister says that this is the way we are going to go forward for the next five or 10 years, there should be a price tag attached to that. The reason that this government and the Greens are in cahoots is that they are afraid of the price tag—and rightly so. This will be expensive. Because it is expensive, it is something that needs to be out there in the public domain.
We are seeing it everywhere. It was on television news bulletins last night. There are issues in relation to the escalating cost of energy across the country. These are bread-and-butter issues for our constituents—the people of the ACT. They are entitled to know the government’s best guess about what this will mean in one year, two years, five years and 10 years time, in 2020 and in 2060. It is not sufficient to say, “We don’t ever do it like this.” It is not true to say that we never cost things like this. That is not true.
What we are seeing here today is the Greens and the Labor Party, in cahoots, saying to the people of the ACT, “We’ve signed up to this, and we have signed up to it sight unseen. We are not prepared to share information with you about the implications of this legislation—not today, and not in the future.” The Canberra Liberals will support and stand up for the people of the ACT so that they are informed. So much for openness and accountability! So much for casting sunlight and ensuring that the people of the ACT are informed about what is going on! So much for the much-vaunted support of transparency that you hear the Greens talk about all the time!
This is where the rubber hits the road. This is where the ACT taxpayers will take out their chequebook and pay for this policy. They are entitled to know. They are entitled to a transparent system that says, “This is what it is going to cost; these are the ways we are going to go.” That is why I support the amendments that Mr Seselja has moved here today, and it is why everyone in this place should support those amendments.
MS LE COUTEUR (Molonglo) (4.28): I rise to speak briefly on the subject of costs and the Greens’ views on these. I would love it if life was as simple as Mrs Dunne was portraying, if we could predict accurately all the costs and all the benefits. Unfortunately, life is just not that simple.
The amendment proposed by Mr Seselja has a problem of proportionality, as my colleague Mr Rattenbury mentioned. It would require the same level of analysis of costs and benefits for a change which could be very minor as for a very major change. We run the considerable risk of spending more money in looking at costs than in looking at policy development or benefits.
And while I am talking about costs, I would like to hark back to what I said on Thursday, I think, when we last debated this. We have to look at all the costs. The Liberal Party is focusing on potential costs of action. We need to look at costs of inaction, particularly the costs of inaction for all of us. I will not go into detail about them again, because we have gone through them before, but they are extreme weather events, heat, cyclones, floods, droughts and increasing food costs. We all know that food costs have increased a lot in the last five or 10 years, and, to at least some extent, this has been due to extreme weather events. And there is the issue of water supplies.
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