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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 9 Hansard (4 September) . . Page.. 2937 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

Recently, more than 2,800 economists from Canada and the United States, including eight Nobel laureates, signed a statement which said that taking steps to prevent global warming is simply a matter of sound economics. The statement points out that measures which slow climate change would be economically beneficial because the potential costs of inaction are great.

In the Australian agricultural sector alone the level of global warming predicted by the IPCC would have profound impacts. Listen carefully to these few examples, because some of them will affect our bush capital and our region dramatically: Increased heat stress on livestock, particularly dairy and sheep; increased damage due to floods and soil erosion; increased severity of outbreaks of downy mildew on grapevines and rust on wheat; and insufficient winter chilling, preventing normal flowering and fruit set of apricot, peach, nectarine, cherry and plum crops.

Mr Speaker, at 32 tonnes per person per year, Australia has close to the highest per capita rate of greenhouse gas emissions of any country on the planet. It is deplorable that the Government of this fragile and biologically diverse country, far from leading the world towards solutions, is allied to a couple of oil-producing countries and Russia against the desire of the rest of the world to set binding emission reduction targets at the Kyoto Climate Summit in December this year. Mr Speaker, I am appalled by this ACT Government's inaction on greenhouse and today I am calling on this Assembly to demand a radical turnaround on this issue. I am calling for the ACT Assembly to move from laggard to leader.

Our efforts must be directed primarily towards reducing consumption of energy produced from non-renewable sources and towards reducing emissions from transport. I turn first to electricity consumption. By the year 2000 electricity production will account for in excess of 37 per cent of carbon dioxide emissions in Australia. Using National Grid Management Council electricity growth projections, it is estimated that carbon dioxide emissions from electricity generation will increase by 16.9 per cent from 1994 to 2000 and the carbon dioxide emission intensity will increase by 4.8 per cent. It is not a simple thing for the ACT to reduce the greenhouse impacts of its energy consumption within the new electricity market, but it is possible and it is vital that we take urgent steps to do it. We have put forward a set of major greenhouse gas reduction initiatives in this Assembly, and the New South Wales Government, facing the same new market environment, have also taken impressive steps.

I am very concerned with the Government's willingness to lock the ACT into the national electricity market and to allow ACTEW to go ahead with its contract with Yallourn Energy without first developing a means for assessing the greenhouse impacts and implications of the new supply arrangements and developing a strategy for consumption by the ACT that would reduce these impacts. This morning we have had the tabling of the Electricity (National Scheme) Bill 1997, a Bill being enacted in South Australia, New South Wales, Victoria and the ACT to make provision for the operation of the national electricity market. The environmental impacts of the new national electricity market are not at all clear. It had been expected that the new system might allow the entry of less polluting generators, but that has not been the case so far.

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