Page 296 - Week 01 - Thursday, 15 December 2016
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Here in the ACT we are proud of our climate change targets and the actions we are taking to achieve them. We now have tripartisan support for these targets, apparently. We are on track to have 100 per cent renewable electricity by 2020. We are on track to have reduced our greenhouse gas emissions by 40 per cent on 1990 levels by 2020. And we have commenced a pathway to zero net emissions by 2050 at the latest.
We are taking these actions as a responsible national and global citizen. But we are also taking these actions because we owe it to Canberrans, who we represent, to do all we can to prevent the catastrophic impacts of climate that will happen here in our region and impact on all of lives. So it is also our responsibility, on behalf of Canberrans, to call on our federal counterparts to cease actions that are detrimental to all of us. They cannot claim to support climate change action and at the same time endorse the Carmichael coal mine, and even worse is to offer government funding to support it.
I do hope that every member in this Assembly, given that they have expressed commitment to our own local emissions reduction targets, will agree to this motion and oppose the Carmichael coal mine. If you support the climate change targets and the reasons we are striving for them, you cannot support the Carmichael coal mine. It is totally incompatible with the pathway we are striving to achieve and the commitments we have undertaken.
This formal statement from the ACT Assembly has a useful and practical effect. As a jurisdiction we will have formally put on the record our opposition to the Carmichael project. We are asking our colleagues and neighbours not to damage our efforts at climate change mitigation and not to condemn our citizens and our environment to harmful climate change impacts. Those impacts affect all of us. Despite the mockery on the other side of the chamber, they do impact all of us, wherever we are located.
I am also the ACT’s climate change minister, and I attended the national COAG meetings, including yesterday, with state and federal ministers. I would like to be able to present an ACT position at those meetings that we do not support the mine or federal funding contributions to the mine and I would like to say that that is a tripartisan position from all ACT political parties.
The impacts of Carmichael, if it goes ahead, will be serious and long term. It will literally change the climate of the world we live in. Obviously, a project of this type and of this scale also has an immediate destructive impact on the local environment, on the flora and fauna. Twenty thousand hectares of native bushland will be cleared for the mine including threatened Brigalow woodlands and the habitat of the endangered black throated finch.
The mine will use 12 billion litres of water from local rivers and aquifers. The Carmichael mine project involves the expansion of the Abbot Point coal terminal on the edge of the Great Barrier Reef. This involves dredging 1.1 million cubic metres of spoil.
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