Page 3149 - Week 07 - Thursday, 1 July 2010
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
As such, I have to confess to being a little perplexed as to why the Canberra Liberals are so up in arms and have publicly complained about money spent on advertising energy efficiency to the ACT public. I think we all saw the article in Sunday’s Canberra Times, and certainly Mr Seselja was remaking this point earlier. Frankly, I thought that it was a bizarre article. I think that their fascination with picking apart the expenditure on this campaign is unfortunate. There is the old adage—and as the party of entrepreneurs, as they would historically claim to be, they recognise—that you need to spend money to make money. And promoting energy efficiency is all about that. It is about spending a bit of money to save us a lot more money in the long term. I am sure members of the Liberal Party must have seen the McKinsey cost curves which detail the potential economic opportunities of energy efficiency.
I think it starts to beg the question: are there any policy measures that Mr Seselja would actually support when it comes to tackling emissions? Every time I hear him talk about this—be it the feed-in tariff, be it energy efficiency campaigns—I hear him critiquing policy ideas. And I am unclear what he would actually support in terms of trying to save energy and cut greenhouse emissions.
When it comes to the environment part of DECCEW, I spoke at some length the other day about the management of our parks and biodiversity as we discussed the TAMS budget; so I will not spend too long on it again here. Suffice it to say that we, along with Mrs Dunne, I know, wait with bated breath for the review of the Nature Conservation Act. And Mrs Dunne spoke about this in her comments earlier. It has been a long number of years coming and I think that the management of parks will benefit from the focus the review of the act will bring. Our parks and nature reserves are struggling to meet the challenges of feral weeds and animals and fight off encroachments on habitat. I sincerely hope that we do see the Nature Conservation Act discussion paper very shortly, because it is well overdue.
I note that the government has also funded a policy position to develop a biodiversity offsets policy. I was somewhat heartened to hear the minister say in the estimates hearings that biodiversity offsets were not a get-out-of-jail free card. I have to say that my fear is that the risk of developing a biodiversity offsets policy is that you end up institutionalising offsets, when offsets in fact will not always be an option for developers and proponents.
The ACT, in particular, will face very big challenges in finding offsets for lost habitats. Habitats are not created overnight and they cannot be picked up and moved. And often offsets are used by developers as the get-out-of-jail free card or biodiversity pardons when they are faced with a situation of losing habitats. This is going to be very apparent with the Molonglo development, where we are seeing nationally significant habitats being put under threat. I would like to debate further in this chamber, at some point, the efficacy of offsets policies.
I think many members would have seen the article recently in the Canberra Times from a scientist who was dissecting the notion of offsets policies and talking about the fact that it is fine to go out and plant trees today as an offset policy but, in fact, the important parts of the ecosystems that we are destroying are, in many cases, many hundreds of years old. It takes 100 to 150 years for a tree to develop the hollows that
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video