Page 4000 - Week 13 - Tuesday, 12 December 2006
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He says that we need to do something about our water supply, but he is going to wait for Actew to tell him what to do. Actew tells him that we do not need to do anything until various times—2017, 2020 or 2023—and then suddenly on the weekend the Chief Minister was writing to the commonwealth asking for jagnastic sums of money. From the commonwealth! Why? Who has got the money? The sound financial managers have it, not this crew, not the Stanhope Labor government. No, they are writing to John Howard, the Liberal Prime Minister, to find money to secure water for the ACT.
At least the Chief Minister is now starting to talk about water security for the ACT and region. That is something that he would not do for a long time. It is interesting, of course, that he wants to talk about extending the Cotter dam. There are the pros and cons of that. I suspect that he wants to talk about extending the Cotter dam because he wants anything but a Tennent policy. He cannot possibly have a policy in relation to a Tennent dam because the Liberal Party had already thought of it. The Liberal Party has been out on the grounds talking to the people, coming up with practical solutions, while this Stanhope government has been fiddling.
Part of that, for instance, was the announcement of a policy outline by Mr Mulcahy, the current environment spokesman, about no regrets. This policy allows people to take practical measures to reduce energy wastage and costs and water wastage and costs and allows us to make serious inroads on an economic basis. If we do not have a sound economic underpinning of our environment policy, we will fail. We cannot afford to fail. We have to get it right, we have to have the right policy, and therefore we have to have a situation where we can afford to pay for that right policy. We will only be able to afford to pay for the right policy under a Liberal administration both federally and here.
DR FOSKEY (Molonglo) (4.13): I thank Ms MacDonald for bringing up this topic for discussion. Everything the government does that benefits the environment is good, so I am not going to stand here and bag the government totally. I have to say that the fact that this topic is on the agenda at all is a good thing. I have not prepared a speech, but I am going to respond to some of the things that have been said and recap on other things that have been said by me and my predecessors over the years.
We keep hearing about a climate change strategy. Until it is on the table in front of us, the climate change strategy is a phantom. It is like air, even hot air: it is colourless, it is invisible, we cannot smell it, we cannot touch it, and we do not know what is in it. Until we have it in front of us, we cannot say how the government intends to make our contribution to a reduction in the greenhouse gases that we believe are, at least partially if not mostly, responsible for climate change and the effects that we know it will have upon us and probably much worse in other parts of the world.
I note that Ms MacDonald spoke about some of our greenhouse gas abatement schemes being equivalent to removing some hundreds or thousands of cars; I did not catch the figure. I would like to see the government actually providing alternatives to using cars. While we continue to have a car-based economy and a car-based transport system, we will need to find ways of compensating for those cars and at some time or other we will have to bite the bullet.
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