Page 2405 - Week 06 - Thursday, 10 May 2012
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It is difficult to estimate precisely how vulnerable the ACT and the wider ACR will be to peak oil …
Recommendation 9 calls for “active support” for electric vehicles infrastructure, yet it concedes:
No evidence was given to the Committee about the extent to which the uptake of electric vehicle infrastructure might increase the ecological carrying capacity of the ACR or decrease its ecological footprint or whether and how this uptake should be accelerated …
Recommendation 9 mentions biofuels, yet, besides a submission advocating it in two sentences, the report conceded:
No other evidence on the potential of biofuels was presented to the Committee …
The report asserts that our use of fossil fuels needs to be reduced, yet it notes:
The Committee was not presented with evidence on the costs of not reducing the significant contributions of transport and stationary energy combustion in the ACT towards greenhouse gas emissions and the ACT, and therefore, ACR ecological footprint …
And this trend continues with food waste in recommendation 17. Yet again, this was neither founded on available empirical proof nor based on the committee process, noting:
The Committee has not been able to find any research that quantifies the contribution that food waste makes to the ACT or ACR ecological footprints …
What does all this mean? This report spells out only one outcome for Canberra residents—higher cost of living. By changing our lifestyles to force us to consume less, this can only mean one thing—higher prices for the things we cannot do without. Already we live in a city where taxation per capita has increased 90 per cent, where property rates and charges are up by 90 per cent, where rents are up 77 per cent since 2001, with average weekly rents at $500. Water is up 200 per cent under this government. Electricity is up 85 per cent and will increase by another 17.22 per cent after 1 July. The cost of first homes is over $400,000. The median dwelling price is $510,000, the second highest in the country after Sydney, which has a median house price at $540,000.
While on the topic of electricity prices, given this government’s support for the carbon tax, come July Canberrans will be hit with an additional $244 to their electricity bills, bringing the average Canberran’s annual electricity bill to $1,662. On top of this, there is also the $225 they have to pay every year in their power bills to pay for this government’s solar feed-in tariff scheme. Given last week’s passing of the government’s energy efficiency improvement bill, Canberra residents will collectively have to pay up to $1 million a month to bankroll that initiative. This is within the context of the recent CommSec economic report which found that Canberrans
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