Page 1820 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 4 May 2011
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the Canberra community that sustainability is important, and if one were to read anything into the outcome of the 2008 election in the ACT, the Canberra community was sending a strong message to the ALP to think even more seriously about these issues and give them higher priority.
Yet I am starting to be concerned that, while perhaps the desire to improve sustainability exists within the government, the government as a whole is not prioritising sustainability issues nor integrating them into each and every government program effectively.
The recurring symptom of this systemic problem seems to be the failure of the government to deliver key strategies over the past two years, strategies that are fundamental to the direction of this city over the next decades and fundamental to improve its sustainability, to prepare for the impacts of climate change and a world change because of oil availability, a world where we will see rising costs of resources and food impacting our community, both households and businesses.
A smart city prepares for these challenges, not just by tweaking around the edges of policy and making a few offerings to pacify the so-called greenies, but by making long-term systematic changes to the way we do business. These long-term changes are the big-picture thinking that we need to see our government start to deliver on, and it will not be achieved without the full commitment of the whole of the government. This also means having a shared agenda right across government.
Treasury and the economic development department need to believe in this agenda as much as the environment department or the transport planners. It is pointless trying to deliver a sustainability agenda when half of government is tussling with the other half about the initiatives. Yet yesterday the Treasurer delivered another budget without climate, waste and transport strategies in place—another year when the implementation of strategies will not be properly funded in a coordinated way.
Ambitious sustainability objectives are all very well, but they are meaningless without real policies that then translate into real action from the government. This year’s budget was a lost opportunity in many regards to getting started on a range of issues that we are keen to see advanced. The government must prioritise the delivery of these measures, because at the moment it seems that it is either a lack of political will, some sort of mismanagement or a lack of resources which means that these balls are being dropped.
I assume the minister will, when he stands up to speak, tell the Assembly that it is all under control and that the government can walk and chew gum at the same time. I assume the minister will lay out the work the government has done on sustainability issues in the last two years, and I would not necessarily dispute that there have been some outcomes.
But this motion is about holding the government to account on a range of commitments that have been made over the last couple of years that have not been delivered. It calls on the government to outline a time line for a suite of sustainability policies that it has failed to deliver on—the sustainable energy policy, the sustainable
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