Page 2393 - Week 06 - Thursday, 10 May 2012
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election we have got distancing of the Greens from the government: “It was not really us. We weren’t there. You won’t find our fingerprints at the scene of the crime.” But they have supported every budget of this government that has led to these poor outcomes.
We hear Bob Brown on the radio saying: “We’ve got an alternative policy to job cuts. We’ll do it a different way.” Bob Brown can stop the public service cuts by the Labor Party, if he is interested, by blocking their budget. But he will not. We know he will not. Senator Brown will not stand up. He will talk about public servants, but the Greens have the perfect opportunity. If Adam Bandt stands up in the House of Reps and votes against the budget, those cuts do not have to go ahead. And if Mr Bandt will not do it, the Greens have got the balance of power and the Senate could stop the budget dead in its tracks. But will they? No. They are too cosy in this arrangement.
Whether it is the Greens-Labor alliance at the federal level or the Greens-Labor alliance at the ACT level, the Greens are all talk. The Greens have had four years to effect the sway on climate change in the ACT through their alliance with ACT Labor. They have come up with nothing.
An MPI today will not fool the people of Canberra. What we have here is an MPI with superficial comments from Ms Hunter. Analysis is important, but the real questions are these: what is being analysed? How is it being analysed? What are the assumptions being used? And how are the issues being framed? Not only will we continue to have ineffective climate change initiatives that increase the cost of living for Canberrans; we now have a Greens MPI that insults their intelligence as well.
MR RATTENBURY (Molonglo) (3.49): I thank Ms Hunter for bringing on this matter of public importance today. It is useful to evaluate the programs that have been in place in recent times. That is what the Greens sought to do when we sat down to analyse the specific points under action plan 1 of weathering the change. This was the policy put in place by the Labor Party in 2007; it came to an end in 2011.
As action plan 2 is being developed, it is useful to reflect on how some of those measures rolled out; to look at the programs and what impact they had, or in some cases did not have; and to try and draw from that what worked and what did not. I think that is quite a constructive approach. It is certainly much easier to come in here and roll out the campaign stump speech, but it actually takes a lot more effort to sit down and do the work, to actually look at the effect of some of the programs and how they could be improved to inform future policy development. That is what this report seeks to do.
The report did find that in many places progress had not been what it should have been. It found that some of the measures in the first place were very difficult to measure. This report was written in 2007, an era when there was no real commitment to action on climate change. The actual target of weathering the change action plan 1 sums that up. If you looked behind the gloss of it—that we were going to stabilise emissions at 2000 levels by 2020—you would see that that was a classic shifting of the baseline exercise. Most scientists and most public policy debate on this issue use the 1990 baseline. When you do the very simple arithmetic around the megatonne
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