Page 1926 - Week 07 - Thursday, 31 May 1990
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What about big bins? This document supports recycling. We want to reduce the amount of waste that goes to the tip. We do not want to create methane, for example, a problem mentioned in the document. Methane is as serious a pollutant of the environment as anything else. We have to encourage recycling, so let us not go down the big bins path. I know that no decision has been taken in this Assembly yet, but let us not go down the path of big bins.
Finally, if we want to put our money where our mouth is, we need to put some money into education. The document simply says "people have to be educated" - that is, the community at large and the community growing up in the schools. In the schools we do not need to do a great deal because so much has already been done. If you have children in any of the schools here, government or non-government, you will know that they have brought home projects on the environment. There is no question about that. Nevertheless, schools do need something in the way of curriculum resources and perhaps something in the way of in-servicing - not vast amounts. The greater amount of education perhaps needs to be directed at the older generation.
In conclusion, I would add that the greatest work in environmental protection in Australia is being done in our schools. Along with the fear of the community about the ozone layer and the greenhouse effect, what is happening in our schools is a major factor in changing the views of Australians.
MR STEVENSON (12.12): Mr Speaker, the two coldest years recorded in the history of the planet were 1975 and 1978. This, combined with a number of other factors, caused widespread concern by scientists around the world that we were entering an ice age. Was there any evidence for this? Indeed there was. In its April 1989 edition, the Scientific American magazine reported a decline in the mean global temperature between the years 1940 and 1965. In February 1989 the US Under-Secretary of Energy, Donna Fitzpatrick, stated that there had been a long downward slide in temperatures from about 1949 to the mid-1960s. The US Under-Secretary stated, not surprisingly:
That slide induced many people - serious scientists and even our serious Congress, to conclude that we were in danger of slipping into another ice age ...
Indeed, in January 1975, as reported in The Greenhouse Trap, by John Daly, an Australian, the US National Academy of Sciences published a report entitled "Understanding Climate Change: A Program for Action", which stated:
There is a finite possibility that a serious world-wide cooling could befall the earth within the next 100 years.
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