Page 2374 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 30 July 2019
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and drier. We are having more extreme weather events. We have to build our infrastructure for that. Our infrastructure, by definition, needs to be long lived—for 10 years, maybe, but, hopefully, more like 100 years. We need to take into account the climate in 100 years time.
One of the other things the current budget does not do is explicitly include some sort of cost of carbon emissions. There is nothing along those lines that I can see. This is what recommendation 55 is all about: there should be some sort of social cost of carbon figured into the cost-benefit analyses of treasury and directorates. I would love to see that. I assume that part of the wellbeing indicators that the government is developing, which I touched on earlier, will include explicit analysis of climate change.
Moving right along—members will be pleased to know that I am skipping pages and pages—I am up to recommendation 111. This is about ambulance levies. It is quite shocking. What happens with the ambulance levy is that if you have private health insurance it pays it to the government, and if you are on a concession card you are not charged, but if you are in between, you get to pay the ambulance if it comes. That is around $1,000 a time. This really seems inequitable. The only people who get to pay it are people who are going to find it fairly hard to find $1,000 at a time of some degree of crisis in their life. I would think that the ambulance people themselves can do enough gatekeeping and only transport people in their ambulance who actually need to be transported. I would really like to see the government look at that again.
Looking at development applications, recommendation 122 is that we change the system so that we renotify all amendments to development applications. Clearly people in the community are concerned that developers use amendments through development applications to seek inappropriate development. The first one has a lot of good features that mean that even though you really do not like the development, you think, “Oh well, it is not that bad, given it is going to happen.” Then there are a suite of amendments that do not go out to the community for comment and take away the good features, and you are left with a dud.
Recommendation 123 is about the urban sounds discussion paper. I remind members that this went out for consultation in 2016. There will be a lot more to say about that tomorrow, because Mr Parton has moved a very relevant item for discussion in private members’ business.
I note the scarred tree recommendations. They are very important because the local Aboriginal community is still concerned about those, particularly because at least one of them was removed by ACT government action.
Recommendation 139 asks for more funding for the low income energy efficiency program, because it is oversubscribed.
I am running out of time; next I will talk about the last amendments.
Mr Coe: We will grant an extension.
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