Page 968 - Week 03 - Tuesday, 29 March 2011
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matters of public importance—because it is a cost of living question. As oil supply dries up, as the price goes up, this will have a direct impact on people’s ability to drive their car, to transport their families around this city. People who are living particularly in the outer suburbs, which are poorly serviced by public transport, will find the cost of fuel for their car going up dramatically.
People may recall just in the last couple of years seeing the hike in oil prices and petrol prices in the ACT, reaching in the region of $1.60 a litre. There were stories on the front page about the inability of families to fuel their cars, the inability of families to get around town, because of the cost of filling their tank. I cannot think of the exact pressures now, but that was the result of the sort of pressures we see at the moment. Petrol right now is up around $1.50 a litre—it has been over $1.50 a litre in recent weeks—because of the pressures arising from Libya. Libya is, in the scheme of things, a fairly small proportion of global energy supplies, global oil supplies, yet we have seen the price of petrol pushed up so dramatically in such a short time frame.
If we actually reach a point where we get to peak oil—and there are various predictions, which we have touched on today—we can imagine the sort of impact that is going to have on petrol prices. Of course, that peak is being brought forward by the rise of China and the rise of other developing countries where the car ownership rate is going up dramatically. All of these pressures are going to create even more demand for oil and this is going to drive us closer to peak oil more quickly.
Mr Corbell started talking about perhaps unconventional oil sources. But those unconventional oil sources are not cheap. He touched on the environmental impact of some of those, and things like tar sands are horrendous for local communities, but they are also expensive. There is a reason they have not been used so far and that is because they are expensive to get out.
Mr Corbell also made some comments that Mr Coe might want to reflect on, because I suspect this is the time frame in his mind. Mr Corbell talked about some commentators saying that not until 2020 will we reach peak oil. But that is not such a long way away—nine years; not much more than two terms of this Assembly—and certainly for Mr Coe I imagine that around 2020 he will presuming to be the leader of the Liberal Party in this Assembly, if he can wait that long. So this is a very real time frame. I am sure some of the people who are here in this chamber today have aspirations to still be members of this place in 2020, so some of us who are here today may be the ones who have to address these problems.
When it comes to the question of whether the public are raising this with us, the public are raising this matter. I hosted a public meeting here in the Assembly, which 70 or 80 people turned up to, to hear a Swedish academic talk about the notion of peak oil. So there are people in the community who are interested in this. But, even if people are not raising it with us, there is an issue of leadership. Being elected to this place is a privilege; but it also carries a responsibility—a responsibility to not just respond to those issues that are being raised with us but also to put issues on the agenda, to talk to our constituents about the issues that are coming down the line and that perhaps they have not come across through the industry they work in and the publications they read, and maybe they have never heard of this.
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