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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 06 Hansard (Wednesday, 23 June 2004) . . Page.. 2540 ..

The briefing I have received from Mr McAllister and Environment ACT is that the implications of sticking to these targets are huge. Substantial additional government expenditure and regulatory imposts on the community would be necessary. That is not to say, of course, that the government should give up on reducing greenhouse emissions. However, it is appropriate to go back to the community and gauge what level of expenditure and effort is considered appropriate when meeting our greenhouse obligations. That is, essentially, the position I have been putting; that is what I have been saying. Let’s gauge the level of expenditure and effort that we consider appropriate.

For example, the original greenhouse strategy has a target of the ACT government buying 100 per cent of its electricity from green power sources by 2008. This proposal alone, according to Mr McAllister, would cost $7 million a year on top of existing electricity charges and this measure would make up only nine per cent of the target. Another possibility on which Mr McAllister has advised me would be to establish a program to provide incentives to upgrade the energy efficiency of, say, 20,000 houses based on our current rebate schemes for solar water heaters and cavity wall installation. Mr McAllister advises me that that would cost the government $28 million. Let me repeat that: the advice is that that would cost $28 million.

We could make solar water heaters mandatory for all new houses, but that would require new home owners to find an additional $2,000 to pay for such systems, as well as the extra cost to government if rebates were paid on these systems. In order to meet these targets the government may, according to the advice of Mr McAllister, have to require commercial buildings to achieve a five-star green rating, but the community needs to be aware that by adopting this measure the costs of construction would increase by about 20 per cent; that is, there would be a 20 per cent increase in the cost of constructing a commercial building were we to do that.

The ACT would have to implement all of those measures, all of them, at those costs and with those implications; yet we would still not meet the targets. Besides these cost implications, the government is committed to “stretch targets”; that is, those that will require a concerted and ongoing effort by all. But to have unrealistic targets might mean that the community sees the challenge as unachievable and therefore may not participate to the degree required or support our actions.

In the light of these realities, the government has decided that other target options should be explored and that the community’s views on those options should be canvassed. For this reason, I do not believe that it is appropriate at this stage just to automatically recommit without investigation to those targets.

It is worth noting that the greenhouse strategy review also found that the government’s ability to reduce emissions is constrained by many factors outside its control. For example, federal government policies that impact on greenhouse gas emissions are to a large extent beyond the control of the ACT, but are an important factor in determining the extent of emission reductions that can be achieved in the ACT.

However, as I have noted, all of this is not to say that more cannot and should not be done to meet our greenhouse obligations. The ACT government has already agreed to adopt the same regulatory and administrative framework for the greenhouse gas

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