Page 3799 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 22 November 2006
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motion on the notice paper since last week. There is a great similarity between them, however, which I would like to explore today.
In relation to the first paragraph of Mr Gentleman’s motion, it is clear that both Mr Gentleman and Mr Mulcahy are aware that climate change is an issue that neither they nor their governments can ignore. Yet this motion does not suggest that governments should do anything much. It recognises that there is policy developed to reduce greenhouse gases but it does not identify whose policy the motion refers to. I am sure that the federal government claims to have policy to tackle climate change, but I do not believe that its policy is adequate to tackle the problem and it lacks the depth and breadth that is necessary to achieve real reductions in greenhouse gasses. We have heard that Mr Gentleman is not particularly impressed by it either.
It is more likely that the motion refers to the ACT government’s policies. We have heard from Mr Gentleman today and from Mr Hargreaves yesterday some of the actions being taken by the Stanhope government in an attempt to reduce our contribution to global warming. I commend all of these actions, but I will argue later, in the next debate, that, laudable though they are, they are not of themselves sufficient. Indeed, this was recognised in the discussion paper issued by the government on a climate change strategy. The government said itself in the introduction to its draft climate change discussion paper released in March this year:
The ACT Government will support and lead the community to make a significant contribution to the global effort to deal with climate change. The Government will continue to support Australia’s involvement in international actions on climate change and will work with other Australian jurisdictions to move the nation towards a sustainable future.
There is a problem here with the way that the ACT government perceives its role in efforts to thwart climate change. It is looking outside itself at other jurisdictions, seeing itself more as a lobbyist than as an actor. Mr Gentleman’s motion takes the same approach.
The final part of Mr Gentleman’s motion—that the Canberra public is educated about climate change and what they can do at the grassroots level to contribute to a cleaner world—is very similar to what Mr Mulcahy calls his no regrets policy. I know that phrase “no regrets”; it is what the environment movement was asking governments to do in the early 1990s when global understanding of the problem of climate change was at its early stages and the Australian government was inside the tent on negotiations to deal with the problem. No regrets meant the taking of actions that would not harm and might even be of benefit to society and the economy and which would be of some use in reducing the production of human-induced greenhouse gases.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change defines a no regrets policy as one that would generate net social impacts whether or not there is climate change. No regrets opportunities for greenhouse gas emission reductions are defined as those options whose benefits, such as reduced energy costs and reduced emissions of local/regional pollutants, equal or exceed their costs to society, excluding the benefits of avoided climate change. The National Academy of Sciences gives some examples of no regrets strategies such as moving away from coal burning, which will improve
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