Page 4851 - Week 11 - Thursday, 21 October 2010
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the Queen, the law and the people.” And the people are the important thing here. Forget the glory that ministers and parties will want to claim on this. Think about what you are here for. You are here to protect the people. The people have a right to know how you will do this and who is going to pay for it. But I do not notice anyone else, except for those on this side of the chamber, talking about the real effects on people.
Climate change is occurring. Climate change always occurs. It has done for thousands and thousands of years. Indeed, you only have to look at the Wilsons Promontory lighthouse annual mean temperature. The annual mean temperature at the Wilsons Promontory lighthouse in 1880 was 20 degrees Celsius. By 1885 it was about 18 degrees Celsius. By 1935 it was 17 degrees Celsius. In between it was just a jagged peak. It was about 17 degrees in 1988. In 1995, the mean was 16.2 degrees. Has it got hotter since? Yes, it went up in 2000 but then it dropped again. The climate does change all the time. But the mean for the Wilsons Promontory lighthouse is pretty consistent at about 16.3 degrees.
So we need to know what we are talking about. But we also need to know the consequences. As the first minister in Australia to put out a draft greenhouse gas reduction paper and the first one to put a strategy in place to tackle the problem, I know what I am talking about in this regard. What we have to do is temper this debate by asking questions about the consequences of any proposal for the environment but also for ACT families, for ACT businesses and for the ACT economy.
You only have to look at the recent example of the Murray-Darling Basin Authority releasing its guide to reducing demand for water within the basin, which raised considerable anxiety and anger because of a lack of analysis of economic and social consequences. And we have now got the authority and the federal government having been forced to undertake additional analysis of water management proposals.
Why do we not learn? Why do we continue to repeat these mistakes? Why are we so arrogant that we think we can get away with such proposals when we really need to consider very carefully any proposal to respond to climate change? I would like to see the proposal from the government through the business impact statement. I would like to see the financial impact statement that they did to back up this proposal. It would make very interesting reading. I doubt it exists.
Perhaps when the minister closes he will tell us what the economic impact on the economy and on the ACT budget’s bottom line will be. If he has not done that work, let alone on the social impact, he should. Everybody talks about the triple bottom line but, when you ask people to supply the rest of the detail, you get caught up in one sector when you have to address all three if you are going to make these changes achievable and, indeed, sustainable into the future.
I note concerns at the international level about published research on climate change matters. Indeed, if you look at the article published in the Climate Spectator on 5 October called “Avoiding Europe’s mistakes”, it shows what happens when they go down strategies like this. It talks about the fact that you need private sector investment
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