Page 451 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 28 June 1989
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
things, and that is what I will be encouraging people to do today.
I am aware that an amendment will be circulated to the motion. It is an amendment that I have discussed with Mrs Grassby and some of her advisers, and it is an amendment which I am prepared to accept and which the Rally is prepared to accept, in order to ensure that this committee has the best possible advantage in looking into an integrated and balanced policy.
Let us turn to the available technology. When people look at that polluted atmosphere on a crystal clear morning, perhaps as they are driving their cars or sitting on a bus or riding their bicycles into Civic, most people are inclined to say, "Oh, well, it is all the wood burning stoves", and there is some truth to that. But the answer is not necessarily to eliminate all wood burning stoves and then start using up all our fossil fuels. At least with wood, we have a renewable resource.
What we need to do is look to how the situation has been handled, certainly in other areas. In Oregon, for example, emission control standards have been set on wood burning stoves and we should be moving quickly to ensure that those same emission standards apply to any new wood burning stove in Canberra, and setting about an incentive program to ensure that existing wood burning stoves have catalytic converters added to them or are replaced with something with a second burning chamber. The technology is now available. Instead of having a wood burning fire that has an efficiency rating of around 15 per cent, we can get up well above 70 per cent. The technology is there and such stoves are available. We ought not to allow any other stove to be sold in Canberra, and we ought to ensure that people are encouraged to change their open fires to fires that are run much more efficiently.
In the meantime, of course, we have fossil fuels, and it is appropriate that we use the time while we are using fossil fuels to get the balance right. Even in using fossil fuels, we need to know what are the most efficient and the cleanest possible fuels to use. We should be aware that when we are using electricity for heating often we are using coal to get that electricity. We should be aware of the sort of limited supply we have of oil, diesel, petrol and coal. Probably at this stage the most efficient form of fossil fuel we have is natural gas, which will provide us with a timeframe in order to find a more efficient system so that our environment can be balanced. It is that balance and those resources that we need to look at within Canberra.
Our trees which provide the wood also are our source of oxygen. When we are burning those trees, we should make sure that what we are doing is keeping in balance so that the oxygen that is being used up in the burning is being replaced by the trees that we are growing in order to
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .