Page 4001 - Week 13 - Tuesday, 12 December 2006
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In relation to green power, it is of course excellent that the government has a commitment to sourcing 23 per cent of its power from green sources. But I am very concerned, and we will talk about this more on Thursday, that the utilities bill is actually going to make it harder for people to afford green power. We know that there is a problem with taking up green power for the ordinary consumer in the ACT. At the moment, unless you are on an income that can afford it and have that commitment to doing it, there is nothing that would make you subscribe to green power. I would really like to see us beefing up the percentage of people using green power in the ACT. Sadly, the utilities bill is going to have the opposite effect. We will talk about that more on Thursday.
If we are prepared to commit the government to sourcing 23 per cent of its energy from green sources, why not go further and have in this so far phantom greenhouse strategy a 23 per cent commitment to renewable mandatory energy targets? That is the kind of thing we have to do. We can talk forever, but unless we start taking some of these actions, which by the way will have beneficial effects in other ways, it is just talk. I know that our community wants a lot more than that. People have been concerned about these issues for years, but the situation has been galvanised, of course, by the Stern report in particular and in a visual form by Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth.
I was very interested to hear today that a Clinton adviser on energy who has been working in Australia for many years is going to head up the institute into which Al Gore is going to sink the millions of dollars that apparently this film is making to persuade the President of America, George W. Bush, that America has to change, because it is understood that, if America does not make the change, it is going to be very difficult to make any real impact on climate change. That is the global picture and positive things are happening there, but we have the local picture to look after.
Unfortunately, while there are some commitments to making sure that all houses now meet the five-star green energy rating, we are still somehow or other seeing houses built which are poorly sited and which have in their planning cooling systems which will either use plentiful water or plentiful electricity. My concern is that the planning reform bill that I think we are going to see tabled this week—if not, very soon—is going to make it very hard, with its private certifiers, to enforce these mandatory energy and water savings in new developments. We know that there is resistance in the building industry and that is resistance that the government has to put concerted effort into overcoming.
Our sustainable schools program is great. We are finding that the school communities are really into them. Of course, children do love the environment. They love doing things around nature, they love having chooks, they love doing things with animals and that is the right way to be because these are the people who are going to have to deal with the problems that our generation is creating. It is a pity that Melrose primary school is slated for closure, because the people there have a fantastic program, they have a great community development focus and they have sufficient land for that community, which is definitely a growing one, with people who would be very interested in working in this sort of area, to become a community resource of gardens,
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