Page 3140 - Week 07 - Thursday, 1 July 2010
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In regard to this new spending that has been allocated to the department over four years, can I say that this is exactly the type of funding that will help build the institutional thinking to develop good policy. It probably comes under the heading of “dull but worth spending”—that is, money to build capacity to measure our performance against targets better, to measure the effectiveness of programs better, and to assess the potential effectiveness of different policy options so that we can decide with some confidence where we want to invest. It also puts resources towards the government cleaning up its own act in terms of greenhouse emissions and setting some efficiency standards of its own.
The minister has stated that the government will be setting carbon budgets for each department, which is not a bad way to proceed. But we are going to need to see what departments are actually using first before we can accurately tell them how to cut their use.
It was heartening to see improvements in the data that is now required in annual reports. The Chief Minister’s annual reports directions tabled last week outlined requirements for energy consumption, greenhouse emissions, transport fuel, waste stream reporting and water as the ACT government moves towards using OSCAR, the online system for capturing ESD data. In the next couple of years as we get better data that is more easily compared across departments, we are going to be very clear about improving performance right across government agencies’ operations. I wish DECCEW all the very best with implementing this work across all departments. It has certainly been quite some time coming.
The issue of government departments improving their energy efficiency links quite strongly to the disappointment that we had at seeing the government’s purchase of green energy only go up to 32.5 per cent from 30 per cent last year. This government has committed to increasing it by 10 per cent each year until we reach 100 per cent. The last Liberal government committed to almost the same thing and, had they stayed in power, they say they would have delivered 100 per cent purchase of green energy for government operations by 2008.
I take some comfort from the fact that I know that everyone in this chamber supports increasing the purchase of green energy for government operations. I am just keen to see it actually happen. If we want to reach any kind of carbon neutrality in a meaningful time frame, this would be a useful contribution towards this and an easy thing to do. With energy efficiency saving across departments, it becomes an even easier thing to do as the savings are made that enable the additional purchase of that extra allocation of green energy.
I shall move on to climate change and energy policies and programs for the ACT. There is no doubt that, since the CPRS got so badly watered down by the federal coalition at the end of last year, it has seemed that climate change has been off the political and public agenda. I suspect, though, that this is just the media agenda and that people have not forgotten. The recent leadership change on the hill and talk of a federal election has certainly indicated that climate change has not gone away. The number of people who continue to raise it with me and, for that matter, write letters to the editor clearly underlines that fact.
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