Page 2961 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 6 August 2008
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it so that I do not fall asleep halfway through my speech. First of all, what is a better city? Really, we have to ask who is it better for? Is it better for the government? If this is the case we would probably see a lot of landmark developments—the kinds of things that a chief minister gets remembered for into posterity.
No doubt a successful arboretum would fit into that category—but the key words are “being successful”. I think that we should look at what is a better city for the people who are most disadvantaged and for a city that is going to still be doing what it should be doing in 100 years time. And 100 years could be a little short. We are nearly 100 years old here in the ACT; so we know that it actually did not take quite as long to get there as we might have thought. I think looking 100 years ahead is a fairly feasible test of what makes a better city. I think that if we are going to be talking about a better city we cannot avoid that word “sustainability”.
Sustainability, of course, has three dimensions. We hear primarily about the economic one here and from the government, but we know that social and ecological aspects are just as important. In fact, probably they matter more to most people here. I actually think there is a question about whether our city will be around in 100 years time. If the predictions by the climate change scientists are accurate, there is a good chance that our city will not exist in the way that our government currently imagines it. Will we have enough water? Will we have more frequent fires? Is this a city that is sustainable to live in without volumes and volumes of cheap coal-fired electricity? At the moment all our planning is premised on the fact that we will continue to have cheap oil, cheap electricity and plenty of water.
Is it 500,000 people by 2030? I think it is. I will be looking forward to seeing the revised Canberra plan and to seeing whether there are any alterations to that which indicate that the government is really taking sustainability on board. Thank you very much, Mr Chief Minister, for the booklet Living in Canberra that came in my Canberra Times today. If I were living in Montreal or perhaps Pretoria in South Africa, I might find that a useful booklet. It seems to me to be written for people who do not live in Canberra to encourage them to come to Canberra. Anyway, perhaps Canberra people need to be encouraged to stay here.
How would we have a sustainable city in 2100? For a start, we would be getting people out of cars. We should be doing that right now. The car should be a very limited last resort option in 100 years time. If we want a sustainable city in 100 years, we have got to start planning that now. That means good public transport. It means amenities close to hand so that people do not have to jump in their cars to go and buy a litre of milk. I must say that people who are paying a fortune to live in O’Malley will have to jump in their cars every time they want even a loaf of bread or a litre of milk. How much forward planning was there in that?
We will need to encourage a smaller ecological footprint. How are we going to do that? We know that Canberra people at the moment have one of the largest footprints in the world. We know that we buy more and throw away more than anyone in the world. We are the people most likely to buy an expensive product. I think it is something like $1,000 per person that we do not even use before we dispose of it.
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