Page 536 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 16 February 2005
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Mr Hargreaves: The federal government.
DR FOSKEY: The federal government. Thank you for that. It is up to states and territories to act. Why the concern about setting mandatory targets? It is certainly true that the government has over the past years accepted mandatory water licensing and mandatory electricity market deregulation.
Mr Hargreaves: Mandatory sentencing?
DR FOSKEY: No, we have not taken that one on. Of course there were carrots offered with both of these. Also, many business bodies are actually begging the Australian government to sign the Kyoto protocol because it opens up a carbon market that they would like to get into.
The reason regulations and mandatory provisions are necessary, even for those who believe that market-led solutions are the answers, is to create the market that will provide the technologies and services and make it easier for us to adopt energy efficient standards. If Canberra joins Queanbeyan when it adopts BASIX, we will at least triple the number of homeowners and developers requiring those services and technologies. As a region, we have the critical mass required for these cutting-edge industries. And there is no doubt that the ACT needs to enter a technical employment area and to reduce our reliance on land sales and development.
The trouble with climate change, Mr Speaker, is that we will not see the impacts of today’s actions for decades. Our children, who will have to live with its effects, will have their ability to enjoy this wonderful planet denied them. They won’t thank this government for caring more about setting up a dragway than for setting safeguards on their children’s quality of life.
The Greens are doing all we can to work with the ACT government to ensure that we play our part. The government now has three years and eight months to meet the Assembly’s target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2008. Instead of a cost, we are going to have to learn to look at this as an opportunity. The government is likely to find that the community supports the leadership it can take on this matter, if the government decides to tell them that it is taking it for the sake of our children.
Kippax shops
MR STEFANIAK (Ginninderra) (6.11): Mr Speaker, recently I have been contacted by a number of constituents and, indeed, business owners in Hardwick Crescent, Holt, the Kippax shops area. Members might be aware—and this is a problem for Mr Hargreaves—that a lot of elderly people live in the APUs and facilities around the shopping centre. There are some pedestrian crossings there. There has been a problem from time to time basically with people hooning around and speeding. It causes quite a lot of concern for the elderly people, especially at the aged units there.
I have been told—and I think it is true—that there actually have been some very serious accidents involving pedestrians, even on the pedestrian crossings. I am not sure of that, minister. One of my constituents actually said she understood that in the last five years
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