Page 677 - Week 02 - Thursday, 20 March 2014
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coal-powered electricity during peak periods? We do not have that information at the moment. How many coal-fired power stations will close down when we save some of our less than half of one per cent of greenhouse gas emissions? Probably not very many.
Minister Corbell is often a bit challenged when it comes to costings, as the government often is. We have examples such as the GDE cost blowout, the Cotter Dam costs. We do not want to take this simply at the minister’s word. As legislators in this place, we must balance the environmental, social and economic objectives most effectively. We cannot blithely approve this net economic drain on the ACT economy without understanding the consequences. We cannot write Mr Corbell and the Labor-Greens government a blank cheque. We would need to know what the costs will be for Canberra households before we would support such a bill.
MR RATTENBURY (Molonglo) (5.10): I am very pleased to be here today debating this bill, and I would like to indicate that the Greens will be supporting this amendment to the large-scale feed-in tariff legislation. This bill primarily lifts the capacity of the large-scale feed-in tariff in the legislation from 210 megawatts to 550 megawatts, a substantial increase in provision of renewable energy into the territory, which will cut our greenhouse gas emission production and will provide the ACT with a fixed-price electricity contract for a period of 20 years.
This will also facilitate the ACT being in a position to meet its 90 per cent renewable energy target, which both the Greens and the Labor Party support, and also put us well on the path to meeting our 40 per cent greenhouse gas reduction target, a target that matches the information that the scientists are giving us, and means that we are one of the jurisdictions that are actually doing the right thing for the future of humanity, based on the best available scientific evidence. This is about the ACT playing its part in leaving a planet for future generations as good as the one that we inherited.
I utterly reject the argument that says the ACT should not do anything because our contribution is so small. The bottom line is that every city, every community, every state and territory and every country across this planet has a part to play. No-one can do it alone. We cannot just leave it for China, as some would have us do. We cannot just say it is India’s problem. We cannot just come in here and say, “The United States is the biggest economy on the planet, let’s leave it to them.” No-one can do that. That is an abrogation of responsibility. It is a lazy excuse and one that I am proud that the ACT is not relying on.
The ACT Greens took to the 2012 election, as did the Labor Party, a position of 90 per cent renewable energy by 2020. I would reflect that the mechanisms we put forward are somewhat different. Our policy promoted meeting the target in a slightly different way, legislating a mandatory renewable energy purchase by retailers. That is something that would have replicated or perhaps extended the federal renewable energy target, a mechanism that perhaps could have been managed by or integrated with the federal regulator, the Office of Renewable Energy Regulation. The thinking behind this was to achieve it at the lowest possible cost. That is why we took that approach.
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