Page 863 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 27 February 2013

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(i) the impact of the Government’s Solar Feed-In Tariff, which will add an extra $225 to the electricity bills of Canberra households; and

(j) the findings in the latest State of the Environment Report, noting that under the last ACT Labor-Greens Government:

(i) Canberra’s ecological footprint is 13% above the Australian average, and is second highest in the country behind Perth;

(ii) in their ecological footprint, Canberrans are using 14 times the land of the ACT to support their lifestyles, an increase of 25% in 10 years;

(iii) greenhouse gas emissions have increased 8% over the last five years;

(iv) waste generation has increased 28% faster than the rate of population growth; and

(v) green spaces have decreased by 9% over the last four years; and

(2) calls on the Government to:

(a) provide all Canberra households with a third bin for garden waste at no additional cost;

(b) explore collaborative models to collect and process other forms of organic waste; and

MR CORBELL (Molonglo—Attorney-General, Minister for Police and Emergency Services, Minister for Workplace Safety and Industrial Relations and Minister for the Environment and Sustainable Development) (4.29): The government will not support the amendment proposed by Mr Smyth today. Mr Smyth needs to go back and look at what his party says it is committed to when it comes to the issue of climate change. The fact is that it has been a spinning wheel of change depending on political expediency on the part of the Liberal Party.

We had the new Leader of the Opposition, Mr Hanson, and his deputy, Mr Coe, on local radio in Canberra in the past couple of weeks following their recent elections to their positions. We heard Mr Hanson say that climate change was exaggerated, that you could prove anything with statistics and that he really did not think it was a serious issue. I do not know where Mr Hanson was during the 2008 election, but he campaigned at that time as a candidate on a policy called “Cleaning up our act—leadership on climate change”. Let us talk about the key elements that the Liberal Party went to the 2008 election on on the issue of climate change. It sounds like a pretty impressive program, when you look at it.

They talked about establishing a solar power plant and renewable energy plant. The cornerstone of the policy includes the immediate commencement of a project to develop a solar power plant for Canberra at the heart of a renewable energy plant. We

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