Page 1671 - Week 05 - Thursday, 5 May 2016
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of life and all ages, people who are increasingly frustrated that political decision-makers are not moving fast enough to cut our reliance on fossil fuels. While I am proud that here today in Canberra we are delivering on climate action, I would like to offer my support to all of those who are in Newcastle on the weekend, because they are right. We need more action on reducing emissions and we need it much faster. I commend the bill to the Assembly.
MR CORBELL (Molonglo—Deputy Chief Minister, Attorney-General, Minister for Capital Metro, Minister for Health, Minister for Police and Emergency Services and Minister for the Environment and Climate Change) (6.08), in reply: I would like to thank all members for their contribution to this debate. I want to start by reiterating the importance of the reforms that we are debating tonight, because even though it is in the small hours, if you like, of the last sitting day this week, this is a really significant reform that we are debating and that we are going to make tonight: the formal shift for our city to establish a 100 per cent renewable energy target, to put in place the enabling legislation to procure the electricity to meet that target, to do so in a way which is affordable to consumers, which is going to create jobs and investment in our economy and, further, to align our long-term carbon neutrality target to 2050, which makes it best practice again nationally and internationally.
These are very significant changes. As my colleagues Minister Gentleman and Minister Rattenbury have outlined, the imperative to do this is so significant. The changes that we are seeing in the global environment that are hitting home here in Australia as well as around the world are frightening. Look at what is happening in Tasmania. A prolonged drought has fundamentally compromised what many of us would have regarded as an unassailable, reliable resource, the Tasmanian hydro scheme.
We have got circumstances where increases in average water temperatures in places along the Great Barrier Reef have seen in some parts of the Great Barrier Reef coral death of over 50 per cent of entire segments of the reef. We have got similar impacts on coral reefs in other parts of Australia as well.
Globally we are seeing fires of a magnitude we have never seen before like the massive fires occurring right now in Canada, destroying entire ecosystems of boreal forest in a way and in circumstances where average temperatures are 22 degrees higher than would otherwise be expected for that time of the year in Canada.
What we are seeing is ecosystem collapse, and it is occurring because of a change in global temperature. Ultimately if this continues, this ecosystem collapse is going to impact on the systems we rely upon for our own health and wellbeing. So we must act. We as a city in inland Australia, very exposed to variations in temperature, heatwave, drought, fire, water shortage, have to do our part.
I do not accept the argument from the shadow minister for the environment that we are only a small part of the picture and we are doing beyond our fair share. No, we are not. We are doing our fair share. Our fair share is what the science tells us all of us need to do per capita, which is reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, reduce them consistent with what the science tells us. These targets in our legislation are exactly consistent with what the science tells us.
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