Page 4295 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 22 September 2010
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matter, as there are, indeed, in every report of the Auditor-General. I do not think I can refer to a single Auditor-General’s report at any time in the last 21 years that has not actually suggested that there were aspects of government administration that might not have been better, including, of course, during the six years of Liberal governments.
MR HARGREAVES: A supplementary, Mr Speaker?
MR SPEAKER: Yes, Mr Hargreaves.
MR HARGREAVES: In the context of Mr Smyth’s questioning around external influences, legislative and otherwise, could the Chief Minister please tell the Assembly how many buses, perhaps, were fitted with compressed natural gas and other environmentally friendly fuels in 2001 and how many there are in the bus fleet we have now?
MR STANHOPE: I do not have a number but it is a point well made by Mr Hargreaves as we reflect today on the great advances we have made in relation to public transport. It is worth reflecting on the sustainability and the dealing with issues where climate change was not exactly first and foremost in the minds or the eyes of the Liberal Party. I do note Mr Smyth, as the sole survivor in this place of that era and, indeed, a past minister for territory and municipal services, is very sensitive to this fact. I heard him, I think, again today: “Sign up to Kyoto; sign up to this fantastic climate change-carbon reduction policy.”
In their last year in government in this place, as I have referred to before, their financial budgetary commission to meeting the greenhouse gas reduction target which they set was $220,000, from memory, or $240,000. The Liberal Party legislated a greenhouse gas reduction target and, in their last year in government, committed an absolutely massive total of somewhere in the order of a quarter of a million dollars in order to achieve that greenhouse gas reduction target. This, of course, is the great fiction.
To go back to the question—the better thing is to go back to the question—I do not believe that, under the Liberal Party, there was a single bus in the fleet that actually had any regard to any capacity to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, despite, of course, their much-lauded greenhouse gas reduction target which they made and then refused to fund, to the extent that a quarter of a million dollars was their massive commitment to a massive reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.
MR COE: A supplementary, Mr Speaker.
MR SPEAKER: Yes, Mr Coe.
MR COE: Minister, is it true that the CNG buses have turned out to be a financial lemon and that you have overturned Mr Hargreaves’s decision to procure those buses and to go back to diesel ones?
MR STANHOPE: They certainly are not a financial lemon, nor are they a lemon in relation to this government’s commitment to dealing genuinely with greenhouse gas
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