Page 799 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 27 February 2013
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where to pick it up from. It is a really simple concept. If Mr Hanson and his colleagues went outside Canberra a little more often and looked at what is going on in the rest of the world, they would understand that innovation and progression are happening in other places.
I cannot speak for the Labor Party—I can speak for myself—but I think they are on board with some of these things, and actually want to bring that sort of innovation to our city so that our residents can benefit from bold new ideas and clever new ideas that make people’s lives easier and less expensive. That is what that policy is about. Hopefully, now that I have explained it to them, the opposition will not make such embarrassing contributions in future debates. It demonstrates that they clearly do not understand the policy concept; it is actually quite a simple one.
Environmental and social issues are far from the labels that Mr Hanson keeps trying to put on them. They are in fact mainstream issues, and very real for people and families here in Canberra.
Renewable energy targets were an initiative of the Howard government, but I do not recall them generally being described as extreme, green or permissive.
Mr Hanson interjecting—
MR RATTENBURY: That suggests that Mr Hanson cannot even come to terms with some policies that a former Liberal Prime Minister was able to understand as being necessary for the future of this country.
Let us look at some of the issues around the cost impact. This is what Mr Hanson professes to particularly want to talk about today—the cost impact of some of these policies. The Greens have put modelling out on our 90 per cent renewable energy target. It is publicly available; you can go and read it any time you like. We have put into the footnotes the modelling assumptions, so again it is completely transparent. That showed that if you take a business-as-usual scenario for electricity prices over the next few years and compare it to the policies the Greens are putting in place, by 2020-21 the quarterly bill savings achieved under the Greens policy would be $33.89. That is a full set of modelling that shows that if you put in place the energy efficiency issues we are talking about, and you look at the future price projections for green power compared to black power, then per quarter we would be looking to save households nearly $34.
That is a significant saving. What that says is that the sorts of policies we are seeking to put in place are actually about protecting Canberrans. Whether it is families or individuals living in households—because they all matter—we are protecting all Canberrans against some of the vagaries that are coming down the line in the future. They are the sorts of policies that we are talking about. When people sit down and look at this modelling, Canberrans understand that these are good policies for their future that are about protecting our community.
They are the sorts of things we are talking about. They are the sorts of policies that are contained in the parliamentary agreement. These are policies that are representative of the aspirations of our community.
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