Page 5253 - Week 14 - Wednesday, 18 November 2009
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It is dwelt on by some of the comments that Mr Corbell has made. He made much, and they should be applauded, of the improvements in relation to renewable energy in the ACT government sector. But that has not been, as yet, mirrored in other parts of the ACT community. The fact that the ACT government is now buying 30 per cent GreenPower is good and laudable, and I have always advocated that we lead by example, but there is much to do to encourage the rest of the community down that path so that we can be in a position where a substantial amount of our power—eventually all of our power—is from renewable sources.
I want to spend some time perhaps dwelling on the past, because I am proud of the record of the Canberra Liberals in relation to this—at times when we were not supported by the Labor Party; at times when we actually even encountered some difficulty from past Green members of the Assembly in even getting certain inquiries and certain work done in the Assembly. We start with the signing up by the Carnell government in 1997 to the Kyoto targets. We were the first jurisdiction in the country to sign up to Kyoto targets, and that is something that I am very proud to have been associated with. I am very proud to be associated with pioneers in this matter.
I am the first to say that I do not think that, at the time, we actually understood the enormity of what we had done and I think that it is fair to say that we did not achieve as much as was needed to set us on that path. But we did take the first steps. One of the things that I am always mindful of is a review of Mr Smyth’s climate change strategy, because it was Mr Smyth who eventually brought in the climate change strategy, that came out in 2002 and said that it was a good first effort essentially. When other jurisdictions were only just beginning to think about climate change strategy, they were saying that this was a good first effort but it was too diverse, there were too many little elements in it and that we should review it and come up with something with some grunt that would give us the results that we needed.
That was thrown out by the Stanhope government; it was ignored. The climate change strategy that Mr Smyth introduced was put on the backburner and, after not talking about it for some time in the run-up to the 2004 election, in 2005 the government abandoned it. So we had no climate change strategy for almost two years in the ACT and essentially no work was done for two years while Jon Stanhope and his colleagues sat on their hands. We did eventually get a climate change strategy, but it did all the things that the 2002 review criticised the first climate change strategy for—lots of itty-bitty little programs, with no real grunt in it.
The Canberra Liberals took to the last election substantial policies that were the beginning of substantial cuts: solar Canberra, house warming for those who need it, the green bins initiative, the Canberra climate change authority initiative, which was modelled on the London climate change authority, and the work of the Woking Borough Council. I am glad to see that the minister has finally caught on to this and was recently able to visit and observe the work of the Woking Borough Council and the now successor of the London climate change authority to see the work that can be done. I hear in the words that he uses that he has eventually picked up on the message, so I congratulate him on that—for taking the initiative to visit these places. He is picking up on the message and I hope that we will see some work there.
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