Page 1457 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 14 May 2014
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With the abolition of the $3.1 billion Australian Renewable Energy Agency, which was formed to develop new and emerging technologies and to help fund world-leading solar research, ARENA will go from having $1 billion of funds, which are already contracted, to a pathetically low budget of $15 million for the next two years of new projects. Clearly the federal government are not aspiring to have any kind of smart, modern, diverse renewable energy sector. They really are dinosaurs in this modern world.
The million roofs program has gone. Instead of $1 billion for a million solar roofs, we have $2.1 million for a handful of community solar projects in a handful of marginal electorates. A small silver lining perhaps is that even the coalition can no longer justify the high level of spending on carbon capture and storage, a beacon of hope that governments of federal persuasion have hung onto for a number of years. They always thought there was some silver lining to burning coal as the solution to climate change. So this is at least one piece of good news in the federal budget when it comes to the climate issue.
Off the back of the federal budget last night, my federal colleague Senator Christine Milne said:
I’ve just watched Treasurer Joe Hockey deliver an unashamedly cruel budget. It’s a budget for big business, and a budget that will hurt the rest of us now while delivering nothing for the future.
She went on to say:
The real long-term challenges Australia faces—like global warming and growing inequality—have been ignored in favour of Tony Abbott’s fabricated budget emergency.
As we saw tonight, there is no plan for new jobs in Tony Abbott’s budget, just a tunnel vision for motorways and stranded fossil fuel assets that will be worthless to our economy within decades. Their budget attacks economic foundations like education and research and aims to tear apart key elements of our social fabric like universal healthcare.
I quote Senator Milne because I think she has summed that up very succinctly there. I think this is a budget that is inherently unfair. I think it does lean on the poor to lift the rich. We are going to see that play out here in the ACT.
I note the comments in Ms Porter’s motion. I think what this budget does is really put the challenges in stark light for the ACT government. As a much smaller government, we have to now look at what steps we can take to try to offset some of these impacts on our community. There are, of course the many job losses that Canberra will face. There is the impact it is going to have on things like house prices, the impact on small businesses who rely on those federal public servants to drive their businesses.
I think Ms Porter’s motion has identified some of the key issues. I will be supporting it today. I do not believe that Mr Smyth’s amendment is an accurate reflection of the
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