Page 4922 - Week 11 - Thursday, 21 October 2010
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Jon Stanhope. When Jon Stanhope came to power, one of the things that he inherited was a review process for the greenhouse gas scheme that we had in place at the time. The review that came out late in 2002 gave the minister some particular direction, and that direction was: “Don’t have a whole lot of tiddlywinks little policies.” It was a criticism of the previous government’s greenhouse gas plan, and there were too many small programs. “Find the appropriate programs that are large and can give you reasonable bang for your buck and invest in those.”
But what did Mr Stanhope do? Mr Stanhope spent about 18 months criticising the previous government’s greenhouse gas plan and then he spent about six or eight months in the run-up to the 2004 election not talking about the plan. Early in 2005, he formally abandoned the greenhouse gas plan. We did not have to see another one until 2007 when, suddenly, he became interested in the subject again. So for the first six years of the Stanhope government there was no action on climate change except to criticise those who had come before him.
This is the context whereby we have today in this place the culmination of the Stanhope government’s newfound interest in climate change. Simon Corbell laments the fact that he is not considered a leader in this field and he wants to become a leader in this field. If that is the case, it is the fault of Simon Corbell not standing up to his leader when his leader abandoned the greenhouse gas plans that were in place and refused to take the advice of eminent people who reviewed the greenhouse gas plan and made suggestions.
When Joe Baker, the then Commissioner for the Environment, drew the Chief Minister’s attention to this in the State of the environment report in 2004 he was ignored quite badly by the Chief Minister. The Chief Minister showed complete disregard. Constantly after that there have been Auditor-General’s reports and the like.
Now the government want to find a little place in the sunshine here. They are saying, “If we have this target, we will look good and we can add to that our feed-in tariff scheme and people will see just how hairy-chested we are on this issue.” But let us look at all the things that they have cast aside in the process. They have cast aside a no-waste plan, which has significant implications in relation to greenhouse gas reductions. They have cast aside a green bin program, which has significant implications in relation to greenhouse gas reductions.
They have looked selectively at particular policy issues, and when they talk about cost, they talk about cost in a very narrow way. They say, “We will bring you energy efficiency and that will compensate for the rising cost of electricity.” If we have people creating increases in the cost of electricity of the sort that we have seen and that appear to be caused by the feed-in tariff in South Australia—and it will probably have the same implications here in the ACT—you are going to need a whole lot of energy efficiency just to counteract the cost of the rising price of electricity.
You have to look again at the critique that was run by the Canberra Liberals of the feed-in tariff, at the time the feed-in tariff was debated. We spoke against the feed-in tariff because by our calculations at the time the abatement cost per tonne of CO2 was $516. I have gone back and looked at my calculations. It was $516. I took this to a
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