Page 790 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 27 February 2013
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Robert Doyle some reactionary progressive or a far left politician? No, he is not. He is a middle of the road, mainstream political leader—indeed, if anything, perhaps a conservative political leader—who nevertheless recognises the importance of developing policies and implementing policies at a city scale that respond to climate change.
Let me address a couple of the points that the Leader of the Opposition mentioned in his speech. The first of those was, of course, his critique of the plastic bag ban. He said, “Why are we doing this?” Why we are doing this is because the majority of Canberrans want it to be done. And that has consistently come through in all of the polling that the government has done with the community to gauge and to understand community expectations. It is a consistent trend that over the last four to five years a majority of Canberrans polled have supported action to reduce the wastefulness associated with lightweight plastic shopping bags. In the most recent surveys undertaken by the government, what we saw was that there continued to be clear majority support to maintain the ban.
Indeed, of those polled, 66 per cent supported measures to implement the ban nationally, and less than a third believed that the ban should be overturned. So that is what the voice of the community is telling the government. Those are the figures that Mr Hanson is blind to when it comes to that issue, and he fails to recognise that there is support in our community to make a shift away from a wasteful generation of waste and towards measures to encourage more sustainable practices.
The same is the case, of course, with measures to support the deployment of renewable energy. Mr Hanson asserts that the cost of renewable energy and whether or not it is going to decrease is simply that—an assertion. No, it is not an assertion. It is a fact. It is a fact that globally and in Australia the cost of renewable energy generation continues to decline.
Go and look at what the International Energy Agency says about that. Go and see what the federal government in its own analysis says about that. Go and talk to the industry about what it says about that. The cost of wind and the cost of solar continues to decline, and continues to decline at a dramatic rate. And at the same time the cost of non-renewable energy generation continues to grow.
The challenge for city leaders is to decide: are they going to lock this city in on a dependency path which will drive increasing costs and increasing levels of pollution, or are they going to seek to make a shift to a low-carbon future, a future where the technology will very soon be at parity with the cost of fossil fuel generation?
Those are the challenges for city leadership, and this government is leading the way on that front. Whether it is measures to encourage the deployment of renewable energy generation at a household level or whether it is ground-breaking measures to drive the deployment of large-scale solar generation through the large-scale reverse auction process, this city is leading the way and is attracting attention and support not just locally but nationally and internationally for the work that it is doing.
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