Page 4089 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 20 September 2011
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It is a great shame that insulation programs in this country now have such a bad name because of the mismanagement of the Rudd-Gillard government and Peter Garrett in particular. Rather than having what should be a practical, decentralised series of programs which are run by municipalities, local environment groups and the like—we have seen lots of experience in other countries where these have been very effective—we tried the big brother approach here in the ACT. In Australia we did not take an approach of subsidiarity, getting local communities to roll out energy efficiency programs in the form of insulation in their own communities; we decided to impose it from on high.
When other communities around the world were making great inroads into energy efficiency through the installation of household pink batts and the like, we in Australia were failing. We were causing house fires and the deaths of people. Instead of having an appropriate approach, a local approach, where there was bang for people’s buck and people saw the benefits of it, we in Australia had the wrong approach.
I spent time, just after the failure of the pink batts scheme, in the United States. I remember having conversations with people at a local level who were rolling out these programs. They were talking about the clear benefits of it. Everyone understands the benefits of it. They could not believe that in Australia we did this at a national level rather than at a very decentralised and local level, where in country after country it has proved to be successful.
Much of the rhetoric that we heard from Ms Bresnan would be lost on our constituents. If we want our constituents to participate actively in reducing their ecological footprint and in reducing their carbon emissions—all of these sorts of things—we need to find practical, everyday solutions. It is about draught proofing, insulating, water efficient taps, water efficient appliances and all of those sorts of things. That is not being done systematically by this government. It takes a piecemeal approach—a little bit here, a little bit there.
One of the most significant improvements that this government could have made—and it has had 10 years to do it—to our water efficiency and to cut down the cost of hot water would be to have implemented a similar sort of tune-up system to that seen in Queanbeyan. But this government, through successive water ministers, has steadfastly refused to take up that initiative. That initiative in Queanbeyan has reduced water consumption and people’s reliance on hot water. It has reduced people’s use of hot water and the consequential use of energy.
What we need to see when we are addressing our ecological footprint and our carbon footprint are practical measures spoken about clearly and simply in a way that encourages the average person, the people in our electorates, to get onboard. Very little of the debate that we have heard here today would do that. It is all too high level, too highfalutin, and the people of the ACT miss out.
MR RATTENBURY (Molonglo) (4.19): I am very pleased to be able to speak to this matter of public importance on the ACT’s ecological footprint, and I thank Ms Bresnan for raising it.
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