Page 3793 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 29 October 2014
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MR RATTENBURY (Molonglo) (4.46): I am pleased to speak to Ms Berry’s motion today which canvasses the very important topic of climate change and how we respond to it. I think the reality of climate change is stark and it seems that almost weekly now, or at least weekly, there are new and advancing scientific studies which are showing both the certainty of human-induced climate change increases and that the impacts are happening and accelerating faster, in fact, than some of the models suggested. Certainly, a lot of them are in concert, as the models have suggested. Those impacts are, of course, well articulated.
Yesterday I spoke very briefly, at the end of some remarks on municipal services, about the impact in the ACT. I was rather badly distorted in the intent of my comments by Mr Coe, so I intend to take the opportunity to return to them today. There is no doubt that climate change will have an impact on the delivery of municipal services, be that establishing new trees or seeing older trees dying off because of heat and drought stress. I said yesterday that during the heatwave last summer we saw the melting of tar on roads, in car park areas. Over a sustained period of days—that was the key point: a sustained period of days—of unusually high heat for this city we saw that impact coming through. Those are the sorts of things that are predicted to happen more frequently under climate change scenarios.
Finally, I mentioned buses and said that during the extended period of heat this past summer there had been an impact on the ACTION bus fleet as buses had struggled to cope with the excessive levels of heat. Mr Coe then got up and, in a fairly derogatory tone, made reference to the fact that all these other cities in the world operate buses in hot environments and Canberra should be able to cope. His observation was true at one level in the sense that, yes, we can. My observation was true, though, that there is a cost to that. ACTION is now undertaking work to ensure that our buses can cope with a sustained period of heat, but the point is that there is a cost to it.
That was the very observation I was making yesterday. People sit here and go, “Climate change, no worries, and we shouldn’t have to pay the cost of trying to tackle it,” but they are completely ignoring the fact that there is an absolute cost in not dealing with it. I can assure Mr Coe and the public transport users of Canberra that ACTION is working to ameliorate those sorts of impacts in the future. But there is a cost to it, as there is a cost to the increased bushfire risk that climate change brings about and also the impact on our ability to successfully grow food and the inherent food security issues that go with increasing heatwaves, changing rainfall patterns and the like.
The ACT is providing leadership on emission reduction and renewable energy targets. I am very proud to be part of an Assembly—or at least those members of the Assembly—that supported those initiatives. There are very practical policies now going into making that happen, including the work within government to reduce energy use and improve energy efficiency. I know TAMS has undertaken a range of projects, as have other government agencies, although, again, the whole government has more work to do. While I was the Speaker, the Assembly made great progress and was able to significantly reduce its energy consumption and achieve a payback period which is leading to long-term savings for this building.
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