Page 3404 - Week 11 - Thursday, 11 November 2021
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Mrs Jones, Ms Lee and Ms Castley before bringing it on today. We have to get together and work together on this and we need our federal leaders to do the same. They are not doing it.
I am a practical environmentalist. That is why, before I came into this job, I set up and ran a recycling company. I was worried about waste, so I set up a solution. I got a patent for a new method and we fixed that problem. I am pleased to say that we have managed to sell that company; somebody else is now running it. Practical solutions are important. It is also why I set up and ran a climate change project. I put myself and my at-the-time-reluctant family through a massive experiment, as guinea pigs, to completely transform our lives to see whether we could slash our emissions to the amount you would need to, to have a safe and stable climate. And we did it. It was really fun and it worked. I believe in practical environmental solutions, particularly for climate change. That is why I am so pleased to be part of this government and part of this chamber that is taking so many practical steps.
Today we have seen Minister Vassarotti, the environment minister, table two pretty astonishing climate change reports. She tabled a report about our air quality, which sets out in very frightening detail exactly what happened in 2019, including the 31 deaths that occurred and the extent of the smoke apocalypse that happened, and gives us a pathway forward. She also tabled another report, which I think went down without as much comment as it should have had, about scope 3 emissions. This is the first time that any jurisdiction in Australia—state, territory, federal—has tackled scope 3 emissions. We are going to start measuring those and we are going to do something about them. It is a really practical step and it has just taken us strides forward.
Minister Rattenbury also tabled today an update on our EV policy. Again, there was another practical, brand new announcement in there that I have never heard publicised before. Apparently, we are now looking at electric garbage trucks under our next contract. That is fantastic. I am so pleased to hear it. There were so many updates in there.
We have seen an awful lot of updates from Minister Steel on our transport sector about the ongoing electrification and the need for active and public transport. There are so many practical steps in that transport strategy. It is all pinned on climate change. It is really good news, because transport is difficult. It requires behaviour change and it requires people to make different choices than maybe they are making at the moment. It is really good to see that pinned in.
I am pleased to see that our climate strategy has over 100 actions in it. I was very pleased to hear Minister Barr’s update on our energy and exactly where we are going. It is really good. I am so proud of all the practical steps we have taken in the ACT: electrification of our transport; steps to deal with our urban heat island effect and to shape our city to make sure that we have a livable city as our climate adapts; a 10-year pathway to make sure our buildings are sustainable and are built sustainably; a pathway to get off gas; and a pathway towards EVs. A lot of these are brand new policies that were not around at all a year or two ago. And now we have got them on the ground and are rolling them out as fast as we can. It is really good to see.
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