Page 3800 - Week 14 - Thursday, 10 December 1992
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MR MOORE (12.05), in reply: Mr Humphries was quite right when he said at the beginning of his speech that what we are doing is raising the issues. I think he was quite wrong in saying that we are not advancing the issues. It is important to understand that one of the difficulties of the committee was that at the moment in Australia we are in the process of negotiating a national electricity grid and, therefore, recommendations coming from the ACT alone would have been as speaking into thin air. There would simply be no point in making such recommendations. The committee took that into account and determined that under the circumstances it would be best to suggest that the Government raise a number of issues through the Australian and New Zealand Minerals and Energy Council, the ministerial council that deals with energy matters. So, focusing on the fact that the committee is talking about national issues rather than simply ACT issues is appropriate.
Having explained that, I would like to take a couple of the points raised by Mr Humphries. For example, with reference to carbon dioxide emissions, it was important for the issue to be raised by the committee in the light of the national grid and the need for national action, and Mr Humphries recognised that. That was one of the issues that made writing the report difficult.
There are a couple of areas Mr Humphries missed. The first is that there is a certain amount of urgency about this, and the urgency does not come from whether we get it right in the sense that he was talking about. That it is a go-slow issue is an inappropriate comment; that it needs to be dealt with thoroughly is appropriate. Apart from Mr Stevenson, I understand, we are all conscious of the impact of the greenhouse effect on our environment. We are dealing with issues of great consequence to our offspring and their children, as Mr Humphries will perhaps find out in the not too distant decade or two and as Mr Connolly has worked out fairly recently, I judge, by the bags under his eyes.
The other thing Mr Humphries failed to understand that the committee was attempting to do was to break the nexus between the cost of technology and new technology coming on. One of the issues raised in submission after submission was that technology for providing renewable energy sources, such as solar hot-water heaters and thermal electric solar generating plants, for example, because there is a lower requirement for it, is very expensive. The way to get these things cheaper is to sell more. Whilst Mr Humphries has recognised that, he has also said, "Let us let it develop". The committee's opinion on that was that we needed, somehow or another, to break that nexus and to move it along. That was the reasoning behind the recommendation Mr Humphries was particularly critical of, namely, 3.5(2), which states:
legislate for an additional minimum quantity of electrical energy to be supplied from renewable sources by the year 2000.
That is left broad because, with the national grid coming on line, one way of achieving that could be to buy our electricity from Tasmania because electricity in Tasmania is produced by hydro-power. That is a possibility. The other possibility is that we could buy a bigger proportion from the Snowy Mountains scheme. That being the case, that legislative requirement could possibly have been met. That is not the intention of the committee, but we had to make our recommendations in the light of understanding that a national grid is being proposed and is likely to be adopted in the not too distant future. The concept the committee is trying to put across is that it is time for us to explore the way we produce electricity and where we buy our electricity.
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