Page 3998 - Week 13 - Tuesday, 12 December 2006
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choices, to ensure that they could cut their energy and water consumption and, by doing so, bring about a reduced cost to themselves and a benefit to the environment. Unlike some people in this place, we do not think it is about regulation and we do not think it is about sticks. We think it is about carrots.
Therefore, at the last election we brought forward, for instance, a policy called the green bank policy which would have allowed people to take out low-interest loans which would be repaid when they paid their utilities bills to make changes and adjustments to their house, perhaps to improve the insulation, to change the fitments in the house to lower energy consuming ones or to change the hot water system to a solar system that would provide them with improved measures. Of course, that was pooh-poohed by the then Minister for Environment as being entirely impractical.
It is interesting that at the time the conservation council said that it was probably one of the best policies put forward in relation to the environment and that, irrespective of which party got into government, that policy should be implemented. Of course, the then Minister for Environment has not taken up that suggestion. I offer it to the current minister for the environment as a suggestion for actually providing people in the ACT with practical possibilities for improving their houses so that they reduce their energy consumption by providing them with low-interest loans—so that they can improve their insulation and they can change their appliances to those which consume less energy and less water.
While this government has been talking—in the last little while they have been talking a great deal about Kyoto—there has been very little done. So that Mr Hargreaves will feel at home, I will mention in passing the failure of this government under successive ministers for urban services to do anything about putrescible waste. Ms MacDonald talked about the no waste awards and how important they are but, until we address the 15 per cent of putrescible waste that goes to landfill every year, we will not be making significant inroads. It would be good if this minister were to stand up here and announce his approach to putrescible waste. I would applaud him for it.
We had Ms MacDonald speaking about the “Think water, act water” strategy—I think that means that if you think about it hard enough the people in the ACT will have water, but it does not work like that—and the ACT government’s approach to having a more rational allocation of water, both groundwater and elsewhere, which will eventually turn up in legislation next year. It is interesting that for the last little while, probably since halfway through last year, most landholders in the ACT have been prohibited from sinking a bore for watering, but it was possible for the Chief Minister to arrange for the sinking of a bore to water the land around the international arboretum and folly that he has proposed, in contravention of the water resources amendments that we made in relation to bores. I presume that there is an exemption. I understand from a quick reading of the relevant scrutiny of bills report that there is an exemption to that moratorium which allows the Chief Minister to do that. I think that it is a poor reflection on Jon Stanhope and his government that there is one rule for them and another for the struggling people in Gowrie or Charnwood who are looking at a dustbowl in their backyard.
While I am on the subject of the arboretum, we have the unedifying spectacle as we drive down the Tuggeranong Parkway of having a piece of land which until a few
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