Page 3316 - Week 09 - Tuesday, 21 August 2018
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The 2018-19 budget provides funding to support a number of policies and programs that will ensure that the ACT remains a world leader in its response to climate change. As we know, our climate is already changing. This is bringing risks to every aspect of our society: human health, our environment, agriculture, our infrastructure and our property. Scientific evidence tells us that there is an urgent need for action, and the ACT government is committed to tackling climate change through our range of programs and doing our fair share as responsible global citizens, as well as protecting our own community.
The budget is investing $845,000 over three years to support the government’s commitment to transition to net zero emissions by 2045 at the latest. This includes $264,000 in the 2018 financial year. This initiative involves undertaking detailed modelling and analysis to support the ACT government’s commitment to transition to net zero emissions by 2045. This work will underpin the development of detailed strategies and actions across all sectors of the ACT economy as we work towards this ambitious goal.
The development of the territory’s upcoming climate change strategy will ensure that key sectors including transport, commercial energy in buildings and waste have detailed action plans in place. These will be supported by regulation and detailed analysis to ensure that we are doing the right things in the right way.
These actions are to be developed through close collaboration with the community, and already the community has given us significant input. I was very pleased, as I have mentioned in the Assembly before, that through the process of setting the targets and undertaking the broad consultation we had an excellent level of community engagement that has enabled us to set the targets already and now, I guess, to fill in the details behind that for the first action plan through to 2025. What this work will help fund is that detailed analysis.
Last week in debate I indicated the broad modelling that has been done to reach the 2030 goals but obviously then, as we bring each policy initiative through, we need to look at it in more detail, and that is what this work is funded to do.
In this year’s budget we have also announced an allocation of $456,000 to support the rollout of 50 dual-electric vehicle charging stations at government buildings and facilities. This is one of the actions under the ACT’s transition to zero emission vehicle action plan 2018-2021. These funds will support the gradual replacement of internal combustion engine passenger vehicles with electric vehicles in the government fleet. As passenger vehicles come off their lease we will replace them with zero emission vehicles, targeting 50 per cent of them in 2019-20 and 100 per cent coming off lease in 2020-21, and onwards until all are zero emission vehicles.
Replacing conventional petrol-fuelled cars with zero emission vehicles will reduce our emissions and noise pollution and enhance the uptake of these vehicles by the broader community as they come out of our leasing period and are available for purchase in the second-hand market. We see this benefitting the community in a number of ways, including government having lower emissions in the short term. We
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