Page 5243 - Week 14 - Wednesday, 18 November 2009
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But let me go through it. The green loan fund was another policy of the Canberra Liberals. We said that “Climate Change Canberra” would be backed by a $5 million green loan fund to finance innovation and environmental improvement by ACT government agencies and community groups. We have seen the strong interim and long-term targets that I have referred to, and we have had legislation to that effect.
This is something that, in the end, the Assembly will have to negotiate. We as an Assembly will have to come to a decision as to what is an appropriate medium-term target. It needs to be something that is strong; it needs to be something that shows leadership; it needs to be something that is achievable.
Then, of course, the hard part starts—the path to actually get there: laying out the plan of how you are going to do it. Anyone can set a target. It is about showing leadership in the other areas as well. That has been the critique; it has been so for a long time now. Ms Porter, you mentioned the comments in the press this week. This government has refused to set medium targets for a long time. It has stuck to the long-term targets because they are the easy bit. The people who set the long-term targets will never be held accountable for them.
The serious business is about setting targets in the medium term that are strong and show leadership but are also achievable. You can say to the community, “We will reach this target. If, by some chance, we do not reach it, we are going to miss it by only this much. It is an achievable target, and this is our plan to get there.” That is the task that we are faced with at the moment, and that is the task that we will be faced with now as an Assembly. You can talk about wanting consensus, but you need to start by acknowledging that the previous government did significant work in this area—nation-leading work in this area.
Ms Porter’s motion goes on. It says:
ACT greenhouse gas emissions have increased by 10% since 2000 …
That acknowledges some of the policy failures of the Stanhope government. The Stanhope Labor government, ACT Labor, have been in charge for the vast majority of that time. They have been in charge since 2001, yet we have not seen things improving. They can do the symbolism and they can do the long-term targets, but in the eight years that they have had to do something about this issue we have seen emissions go up by 10 per cent. That is acknowledged in Ms Porter’s motion.
Ms Porter acknowledged a number of other things which are important and which I want to touch on. In her speech, Ms Porter talked about the need to lobby the commonwealth government on this issue. I agree with her on that. That is a very important thing that came from our committee process. Ms Porter will recall the evidence of Dr Richard Dennis, who has been very outspoken on the issue, both in our committee and in the media—the national media and the local media—on this issue. He said that the CPRS that the Rudd government wants to implement—of course, that is the CPRS that the Rudd government, if they had a majority in the Senate, would have rammed through—would take away the initiative.
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