Page 3997 - Week 13 - Tuesday, 12 December 2006
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Ms MacDonald: What do you drive? Oh, a Territory!
MRS DUNNE: I live in a pise house that has no heating or cooling and it works very well. We can engage in one-upmanship if we like, but it is about policy. It is not about individual action; it is about policy that helps to form sound individual action.
Ms MacDonald: Are you saying individual action does not have an effect?
MRS DUNNE: Individual action is important, but it takes leadership from government. I have been in this place for just over five years and, when it comes to the environment, this government is nowhere near out in front. Its members like to talk and they like to posture, but it is really all about them standing around and talking about what they have done. For another half an hour members of the government will be standing around here talking about what the government has done, but it cannot walk the walk. It can only do the talk.
When Mr Stanhope was Minister for Environment he instituted the Office of Sustainability but did not fund it. It was underfunded for a considerable period. He was the sort of person who would say, “I have got an Office of Sustainability. Aren’t I grand?” We are still to have the first lot of sustainability legislation, which is long overdue. It has not arrived yet because, quite frankly, the government does not know how to go about it. It was all very well for Mr Stanhope and other ministers to swan around at international meetings in Wales and elsewhere talking about sustainability, but they have not actually done anything.
Mr Hargreaves: I haven’t been to one.
MRS DUNNE: You have just missed out, haven’t you? The previous Liberal government had a policy in relation to greenhouse gas emissions which was criticised here by Mr Stanhope. He criticised it so much that after the election in 2004 he quietly went away and killed the policy in relation to greenhouse gas emissions, despite the protestations of people who were active in the community and in the industry in relation to greenhouse gas emissions, and so far the government’s response, apart from killing the policy, has been one of silence. There is no alternative policy.
It is interesting that a couple of weeks ago in the Assembly, after the Stern report came out and Al Gore flashed to prominence with his An Inconvenient Truth film, the Stanhope government suddenly was all too green. I think that for a whole week every dorothy dixer was about environmental sustainability, so that we heard at length about what environmentally sustainable things the government was doing in a range of agencies. I was thinking then that if I heard again about the Harrison school and how environmentally sustainable it is I would be physically sick. The minister kept talking about its thermal mass, its natural light and its ventilation. That means that it is a brick building with windows that open.
The thing is that a lot of the environmentally sustainable things that we might do in and around our houses are pretty much matters of common sense if there is leadership from the government and there is assistance to do so, which is why at the last election the Liberal opposition brought forward a range of policies to help people make those
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