Page 5053 - Week 12 - Tuesday, 26 October 2010
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targets. We disagree on the extent of those targets but it will now be up to the government to actually turn these targets into a reality, turn these targets into a plan. What this amendment would do is ensure that the minister prepares a report on the actions the government intends to take to meet the targets mentioned in part 2 and the expected costs of implementing the actions under paragraph (a) for the government and the community. And the minister must present the report to the Legislative Assembly by 30 April 2011.
There is also a report about the costs of implementing policies. This section applies to a government policy that a government agency proposes to implement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in accordance with the act. The minister must prepare a report about the expected costs for ACT households and businesses if the policy is implemented.
We would expect that this is the kind of clause which would improve this bill and is particularly one that would be welcomed by the government if they are fair dinkum—if they are fair dinkum about doing this and if they are fair dinkum about being held to account in the way that they do it. If one sees a situation where the government do not support this—and I understand that is the case—one can only conclude that they have doubts about their ability to be up front with the community about what they are doing and about how much it will cost. They have doubts about, perhaps, their ability to set out a road map.
Often we will hear from the minister that they set it out in various documents. We know how long they have delayed doing that in various circumstances. And so what this does is set a time frame and set out what must be done. This is a fairly basic requirement. This would be a fairly basic requirement in terms of what the community would expect us to be doing to be ensuring what our government does as it pursues these policies.
I think it is an important amendment because, again, it goes to those two issues. It goes to the issue of accountability of this government for its targets and what it is going to do and it goes to the issues of costs. It goes to the issues of how much it will cost.
We have heard Mr Rattenbury. The whole bill is predicated on the fact that there are costs to not doing things. The whole bill is predicated on the fact that there is a decision that there should be action. So what we need to do now is say: “Yes, we are agreeing that there should be some environmental outcomes. We differ on the way of getting there. We differ on the extent of those actions that should be taken. We differ on the extent of the emissions cuts.”
But having agreed that there should be targets, having supported legislation to implement targets, surely we can agree that we want to hold the government to account on how they do it and that we want them to outline the costs. In all of these discussions it is implicit that there are environmental benefits; otherwise you would not bother with a regime like this. You would not bother with environmental legislation such as this if you did not believe that there was some environmental benefit.
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