Page 940 - Week 04 - Thursday, 3 May 2007
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issue facing the world by, essentially, committing the nation to nuclear power generation. That is its response.
Mr Smyth: What is your response?
MR SPEAKER: Order, Mr Smyth!
MR STANHOPE: That is his leadership: refusing to show any commitment to issues around emissions trading and the enormous work that has been undertaken by the states and territories on the most significant initiative that we all know needs to be pursued by Australia.
Mr Smyth: Six years.
MR SPEAKER: I called you to order, Mr Smyth.
MR STANHOPE: The most significant initiative that can be pursued, embraced, adopted by any nation, including Australia, is the creation of an emissions trading scheme, something which the Prime Minister, the Liberal Party and the federal government have absolutely doggedly, stubbornly, refused to contemplate or accept out of some sort of ideological commitment to I do not know what, but as part of its overarching denial of the reality of climate change. The states and territories have embraced it. That is what we have done. I have worked with the states and the Northern Territory to create and develop an emissions trading scheme which we are intent on implementing, with or without the commonwealth by 2010.
I think that it is an indictment of the federal government’s position or attitude to climate change that it is refusing to work with the states and territories on a national approach and a national response to climate change, but we are not. We are working with the states and territories. We are committed to the implementation of an emissions trading scheme by 2010, as I say, with or without the commonwealth. It would be far more productive if it were with the commonwealth because of the important role that it would play in relation to such a scheme and, indeed, the difficulties inherent in the states and the territories being forced to go it alone. So that is what we are doing.
It is to the eternal shame of the commonwealth and the Liberal Party in Australia that it has been left to the Labor parties and the Labor governments of Australia to fill the vacuum left by your sorry abandonment of this particularly important issue. We are, as you know and as I have reported fairly regularly, in the process of finalising a climate change strategy. That is something which we will finalise shortly and which we will devote ourselves to implementing.
MR MULCAHY: I ask a supplementary question. Chief Minister, now that the sustainable transport plan has been set aside for review, how is your climate change strategy going to deal with the issue of greenhouse emissions caused by transport in the ACT?
MR STANHOPE: The sustainable transport plan has not been set aside. It is alive and well, as is the work which the ACT government has done in relation to climate
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