Page 3797 - Week 14 - Thursday, 10 December 1992
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Recommendation 3.3 talks about "include energy conservation and renewable and alternative energy studies in school curriculums". I do not agree with that, for a couple of reasons. The first is a very simple one. The ACT Government and the ACT department do not tell schools what will be included in an individual school's curriculum.
Mr Moore: Yes, but we can make suggestions.
MR HUMPHRIES: I will come back to that. It is purely a matter for individual schools. The recommendation does not say that individual schools should include those items; it says that the ACT Government should include those items. Perhaps that is just a bad form of words. I am not in favour, in our present system, of having mandated forms of curricula laid down from the central office of the Department of Education. If particular programs are developed which are valuable, they will be picked up, because they are valuable, by schools in our system and they will be used. With our present structure, I am opposed to the concept of saying, "This is going to be the flavour of the month. We are going to be following this particular line in our schools and you are going to teach this particular issue". That is not the way we work in the ACT.
I take issue also with recommendation 3.5(2), which urges the ACT Government to:
legislate for an additional minimum quantity of electrical energy to be supplied from renewable sources by the year 2000.
Let me say at the outset that I think it is fantastic that we are developing the option of providing electricity to consumers in the ACT from renewable sources. That is a very good piece of news for those of us who are concerned about the depletion of fossil fuels. At the same time, it is of concern that we should say that, in anticipation of a technology developing which will make it efficient for us to get a certain specified percentage of our electricity needs from this new source, we are going to legislate to require that it come from that source.
There are lots of ways, and they are mentioned in the report, of accelerating the development of this technology. Requiring that the market shall exist so that we can buy from that market is not one of them. We are setting targets and hoping that technology will catch up with those targets in time for them to be met. I do not think legislation is the answer. It raises certain questions: How will it actually work? Whose responsibility is it to supply this energy? What will it cost? What if renewable energy sources are available only from, say, outside the Territory, and perhaps a great distance from the Territory, so that we are looking at purchasing renewable energy from Sydney or Melbourne or something of that kind? What is that going to do to the cost?
The committee does acknowledge that there are problems with working out the costs of energy and that not all the social costs are reflected at the present time in the cost of electricity in the bill we get from ACTEW. For example, if you added into the present equation the environmental consequences and the environmental costs that are associated with consuming fossil fuels, you would certainly lift the amount people pay. This raises the question of what we are going to pursue in the way of a cost structure for this renewable energy. Is it going to be subsidised in some way? Is it going to be paid for at the cost at which it is actually produced?
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