Page 1235 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 24 March 2009
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In the Assembly, another simple one which would not only save money but also save annoyance would be to get rid of the fax machines. All they produce is ads from Dell or from people I do not particularly have any need to correspond with. We would save paper and we would save electricity, because they are on all the time. The few faxes that we wanted to get we would have electronically, which for people like me would be easier to refer to in the future.
Another area I will move onto is efficiency of buildings. Ms Hunter talked about that briefly. We have in front of us the report of the standing committee on climate change and energy. They quote the Australian National Audit Office from 2009 as saying:
… significant emissions and cost savings can be delivered through sustainability reforms in the building sector …
We are about to demonstrate that with the third appropriation. Members may remember that one of the significant expenditures in this—and I say significant because it is going to be spent on the building which we are all inhabitants of—is replacement of the chiller unit. The PAC report said that the Acting Speaker advised the PAC that an audit:
… estimated that a replacement unit could reduce chiller energy consumption by about 33 per cent or 10 per cent of the building’s total annual electricity consumption.
The report continued:
This would equate to a saving of 120 tonnes of CO2 and $15,000 per year.
Currently we have an example of wasteful expenditure but we will shortly, hopefully, have an example of less wasteful expenditure. This is just a small example of the things that could be done in the area of green buildings and green government buildings.
Again drawing back on my previous experience, I was one of the directors of Australian Ethical Investment, which is a medium-sized company based in Canberra, now based in Bruce. When we moved to Bruce, we refurbished our building. We did not have any excess money, so we did not do this as a showpiece so much as do something which would be both environmentally and economically sustainable. For the cost of a normal refurbishment of a building, we moved the building up to six green stars. Compared to the previous energy use in that building, we reduced energy by 75 per cent, and we reduced CO2 emissions by about the same amount. And we did this for the normal cost of refurbishment.
Basically what we did was spend the money on double-glazing and a more intelligent building management service instead of putting a lift between our two floors. I point this out to show that some of the expenditure of the government currently is wasteful. It could be improved. We need to invest our money in improving the ACT government’s building stock, which in the long term will lead to reduction of waste, saving of CO2 emissions and saving of finances.
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