Page 4923 - Week 11 - Thursday, 21 October 2010
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range of people and I said: “Have I got this wrong?” It does not matter which way you add it up and how you calculate it, if you start from point A, you get to $516. That figure has fallen back a little because the scheme has now been revised back, the multiplier has been revised back, but we are now in the vicinity of about $450; $350 to $450.
It is extraordinarily expensive abatement. It was the point that I made at the time of the debate on the feed-in tariff. When you look at all of the information available to us, I said at the time that if we are going to be spending ACT taxpayers’ money in this way, we should be getting much more bang for our buck. I pointed to the McKinsey curve, which members here will be familiar with, and all the things on the McKinsey curve that point to the abatement that you can do, some of which is at no cost, some of which gives you a net return, particularly insulation. Around the $150 mark per tonne of CO2 saved will give you a return of $150—all the way through the McKinsey curve. And the McKinsey curve only goes up to about $100 a tonne, per tonne of CO2 returned. The feed-in tariff, the cost of photovoltaics, is not even on the McKinsey curve; it is on the dotted line that goes off into the “too expensive to contemplate at this stage” range.
This is the problem with the government’s approach to this whole debate. Firstly, they abandoned the field for years. They had no interest in it; it was not an issue for them. I suspect that somewhere in the period after the 2004 election, in the run-up to the 2008 election, they thought that perhaps they needed to get on board with this and they suddenly found some interest in the subject. But they did get a bit of a flogging in the run-up to the 2008 election because of the failures and the weakness of the weathering the change document. I do not know that there was anyone outside the Labor government who had a good thing to say about the weathering the change document in terms of its failure to set interim targets, its failure to set achievable targets along the way. I hope Mr Rattenbury remembers his criticisms of the document before the 2008 election.
After they abandoned the field for such a long time, they came late to the argument. They have spent a lot of time doing exactly what the consultants and the people who reviewed previous things said—cobbling together a whole lot of little programs that will give you a little bit here and a little bit there, which are uncoordinated and therefore costly. At the same time they criticise the Canberra Liberals for not at this stage putting forward a costed analysis. There is no costed analysis from the government about how they are going to proceed towards this 40 per cent target. There is no road map and there is no costing for the cost of that journey. The people of the ACT deserve a costing for that journey before they sign up to it.
MS LE COUTEUR (Molonglo) (5.20): I rise to speak briefly on some costs which seem to have been totally ignored in this debate—that is, the costs of climate change itself, the costs of inaction, the costs of not doing enough to actually address the issue. I think we are all aware of a lot of these but we just have not focused on them in this debate. We know there are going to be big costs on energy supply, water security, agriculture, health, coastal communities and infrastructure.
Coastal communities are an obvious one. We already have the situation in New South Wales where people are not able to build on land that they own because the local
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