Page 3665 - Week 10 - Thursday, 19 September 2019
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
What we have seen today during the MPI reminds me of the Gremlins movies of the 80s. The gremlins were cute and fluffy until you poured water on them when they frankly turned pretty feral and became very hard to handle. That is what we have just seen from the Liberal Party. The cute and fluffy Liberals have turned up to the Assembly today and have gone, “Oh! Climate change. We’re into that. We’ll take action.” They have obviously dried themselves off because Mr Coe has spent most of the week being the gremlin covered in water.
We have seen an extraordinary reaction from the Canberra Liberal Party to the latest climate action plan for the ACT. The policy the Chief Minister and I announced on Monday sets out a considered plan for the ACT to continue on its pathway to zero net emissions by 2045. We have seen this week the most extraordinary misrepresentation of that policy by the Canberra Liberals.
Mr Hanson has come in here today and said, “We support pragmatic measures, not alarmism.” Well, let’s us look at some of the alarmism that has been peddled by the Canberra Liberals this week, including by Mr Hanson in today’s debate when he said, “We don’t agree with turning off people’s gas.” I would like Mr Hanson to show me where in the strategy it says that people’s gas will be turned off.
The government has made a clear commitment that we need to phase out gas. Natural gas is a fossil fuel that is contributing to global warming. We need to move away from natural gas, but the suggestion from the Canberra Liberals that the government is actually going to turn off people’s gas is outrageous. If you want to talk about creating alarmism, let’s look at what the people across the chamber have been doing all this week, in this city.
We saw a quote from Mr Coe in the Canberra Times that the reasonable way to achieve any emissions reduction is not waving a big stick around and banning people from using their cars and heating their homes. Where in the strategy does the government say it is going to ban people from heating their homes? This is outrageous. This is a disgusting raising of fear in our community that has seen people contacting radio stations saying, “What am I going to do when the government comes and removes my gas heater?”
The government is not going to remove anyone’s gas heater. What we are saying to people is, “At the end of the life of your product in 20 to 25 years”—that is what happens with these pieces of machinery; they actually wear out—“make the smart choice and transition to electricity. Remove your connection fees for gas and have one single connection cost.”
We know that the price of gas has skyrocketed. It is no longer, as we have been told for the past couple of decades, a cheap source of energy. Gas is no longer the clean source it used to be. It was clean relative to black coal fired power but compared to 100 per cent renewable electricity, gas is no longer the clean fuel it was once marketed as.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video