Page 4088 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 20 September 2011

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environment centre and SEE-Change. These organisations work with the government to raise awareness and promote dialogue about sustainability issues as well as develop practical initiatives. The government is committed to developing a sustainable city. It is committed to reducing the land and water consumption that underpins our lifestyles and to looking after our wonderful environment.

MRS DUNNE (Ginninderra) (4.12): The notion of any community’s carbon footprint is a very important issue. The consideration that we put around this at a high level needs to inform our policy at a high level. I am concerned that in debate—and especially the things that were said by Ms Bresnan—we sort of miss the point here. In this place and in government we are making high level policy, but how do we translate that into things which are effective and meaningful in our community?

I was a little alarmed when listening to Ms Bresnan. I was thinking, “How would Mr and Mrs Waramanga or Mr and Mrs Theodore take what she said and put it into practical application in their lives if they wanted to?” First of all, we have a job of work ahead of us in encouraging members of the community to take practical environmental steps—steps to reduce our carbon footprint, steps to reduce our energy consumption and steps to look at issues like where we get our food from and how it is grown.

But if we talk about it in abstract terms in the way that Ms Bresnan does I think there is a risk that we never actually get practical application on the ground. Without practical application or activity in every person’s life, wherever they live and wherever they are making decisions about how they spend their resources, we will never get a better situation in relation to our carbon footprint, our ecological footprint and the way we use or conserve energy.

The Canberra Liberals have always addressed these issues in a way that we hope will create practical action on the ground and give good results, which is why for a long time we have been critical, for instance, of the now essentially defunct feed-in tariff, because it was an expensive way to cut greenhouse gas emissions. The calculations that were done when the legislation was introduced were that it was about $500 per tonne for every tonne of CO2 mitigated. There were lots of ways to do it for less and there were lots of ways that would actually return a positive economic benefit to the people who participated.

These are real, significant issues. If you are going to get the community to participate in a program it has to be practical. It has to have a kick-on effect rather than just giving a warm, fuzzy feeling inside. It has to be something that people can do easily in their own workplace, in their own office and in their own neighbourhood, which is why the Canberra Liberals over the years have approached this in a practical way to look at ways of reducing energy use.

Energy efficiency, as all of the experts will tell us, is the thing that we should be concentrating on first when we are looking at each individual’s carbon footprint and ecological footprint, with things like the appropriate use of insulation. The appropriate way in which we build our houses will provide much more bang for our buck than almost anything else that we can do, and insulation is one of the most important things we can do.


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