Page 1596 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 31 March 2009
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The ACT Greens have spoken in this place before about the fact that economic times are tough. We acknowledge that. We know it is not possible to conduct business as usual. The global financial crisis is with us, climate change is with us and the future of oil production is uncertain. It is fairly easy to point to some obvious sources of revenue which the government should explore. Unfortunately, I did not hear that from Mr Doszpot.
We will take the courage—and we need to take the courage—to put steps in place to move to a new, green economy. The Greens will be providing solutions to build an ACT economy in the future that is sustainable both economically and environmentally. President Obama has recently promised a green job package to create five million jobs in green sectors, believing that it makes sense to use a global economic crisis to start the long, hard process of making economies more sustainable. Ban Ki-moon indicated at the Davos World Economic Forum in February that the economic crisis presents us with the opportunity to solve many of our current troubles, including the threat of global recession.
The green economy is happening elsewhere overseas, with regional governments taking a proactive role to planning in their cities which centres around not only preserving the environment but saving money. In my speech on a matter of public importance on the green economy which I delivered in the Assembly on 9 December 2008, I used the example of the Masdar City project in the United Arab Emirates. Masdar will rely entirely on solar and other renewable energy sources. It aims to create a sustainable zero-carbon, zero-waste ecology. The city will be home to 50,000 people, which is similar in size to the Molonglo development. It seems that long-term strategies like this for new developments are one way of improving the ACT government’s revenue base.
In Razhao, a city of nearly three million on the Shandong Peninsula in northern China, 99 per cent of households in the central districts use solar water heaters, and most traffic signals and street and park lights are powered by photovoltaic solar cells. In the suburbs and villages, more than 30 per cent of households use solar water heaters and over 6,000 households have solar cooking facilities. In addition, the city requires all new buildings to incorporate solar panels.
We support the ACT government building on the strengths of the region. A major strength in the ACT is that we have a considerable research capacity which is built on the foundation of institutions such as the ANU and CSIRO. In this context, as I said before, we support the government’s recent investment in the ANU’s new Climate Change Institute. Professor Will Steffen, the institute head, said:
We can devise a way of using our own city, and the Canberra region as a big laboratory to test new ideas.
More concretely, we have included initiatives to move to a greener economy in the Labor-Greens parliamentary agreement. A key feature of the agreement is an energy efficiency makeover of Canberra homes rated lower than three stars. This program is a winner for the environment, the occupants of the houses and the ACT economy,
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