Page 3106 - Week 07 - Thursday, 30 June 2011
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It would be fair to say that I am deeply concerned that if we continue to move at this pace on sustainability we will struggle to meet our 2020 greenhouse target. And it is a depressing thing to be saying that within a year of passing the legislation, but certainly some of the signs are of concern.
When it comes to energy programs, it is worth thinking about what is next. One of the particular outcomes that we would like to see legislated before the end of this term is a comprehensive mechanism to fund energy efficiency improvement in the residential sector. My understanding was that the government was considering tabling some legislation to mandate the retail electricity sector to deliver on those savings through a white certificate trading scheme. That legislation was mooted in the last legislative program but we have not heard anything since. This would be a central piece of the greenhouse emission reductions strategy and probably one of the very least expensive options.
With efficiency measures, we also need to see what options there are for mandating a higher territory purchase of green power over the years ahead—effectively a bigger renewable energy target for the ACT and not the sort of target that the minister announced a few months back, which just sought to add up what we were already doing, but a target that sits with a mechanism to increase our renewable energy purchasing. These are the two big-ticket items on greenhouse reductions for the ACT and they will align well with a federal carbon price.
So while we are keen to see the ACT’s renewable energy generation sector become sustainable as an important component of a zero carbon future, we still have much work to do on systematic change in the ACT. And this is the work that I acknowledge is not necessarily delivered through big injections of funds in the budget but rather through the policy development that will underpin it.
Given how long it is taking the government to deliver these strategies and the pieces of legislation—and we have discussed the delays in the industrial scale phase of the feed-in tariff earlier today—clearly one of the things that need to be done is to spend a bit more money on recruiting and keeping more staff and managing these very precious people resources a little more carefully. It is really not too much to ask in terms of a commitment towards addressing climate change.
On environment more generally, I spoke at some length the other day about the management of our parks and biodiversity as we discussed the TAMS budget. So I will not spend too long on it here. But certainly the Greens welcome the $660,000 over three years for nature conservation resource management, which appears to have come about as a result of problems in our nature conservation identified in the review of the Nature Conservation Act. It is interesting that the government has moved with such speed on allocating this funding, given that the Nature Conservation Act public consultation was only completed in the early part of this year. It implies a move towards voluntary conservation management on rural leases and a few other things that perhaps we will hear more of in the next few months.
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