Page 1863 - Week 05 - Thursday, 16 May 2019
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Secondly, I would like to talk about trees. We are losing trees at the rate of 3,000 per year from our publicly owned urban areas. Trees are good in many ways. In particular, they use carbon from the atmosphere to grow. This gets the greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere, where they are changing our climate, into a stable long-lasting form. We allow such large private buildings that there is often no space for trees on blocks. We need a canopy target. We do know that the people of Canberra would support a canopy target, as a 30 per cent canopy target was one of the recommendations of the better suburbs consultation process.
Thirdly, we need to look at all government decisions, especially infrastructure decisions, in terms of climate change impacts. As far as I know, that does not happen at present.
Fourthly, there are a whole heap of things the ACT government could do better. The two previous speakers, Ms Orr and Mr Rattenbury, mentioned some of them. They are things such as rebuilding our transport system to be zero, or at least low, emissions; stopping building so many new roads; planting trees, not destroying them; changing our planning system to stop building big new houses; and starting to repurpose existing under-utilised buildings. New houses are twice the size they were when I grew up.
As I said in my motion that I moved earlier this year: start building for the new hotter climate; stop installing gas and subsidising people to switch to gas from wood fires; start a real campaign to reduce consumption; stop expanding our international airport; stop expanding international tourist travel. It is just not compatible with a climate change emergency. Educate people to the pluses of a plant-based diet and start composting our food waste. I could go on, but I am running out of time. I am also aware that the ACT government will soon be issuing our climate change strategy, which hopefully will have a lot of the things we have talked about today, plus a whole heap more. We do have a climate emergency and we must start acting on it now.
MR RATTENBURY (Kurrajong) (4.31): I note and support the amendment. The Greens will support it today. It is an amendment that adds actions the ACT is taking in relation to climate change. I support these because they are factual statements and we have been involved in them and pleased to help deliver them. I emphasise that this is not a motion about listing what we are already doing and patting ourselves on the back. As I touched on earlier, we are not in a position to be complacent. We need to extend our efforts and not rest on our laurels. There is certainly much that this government needs to do.
Is each and every one of its decisions really compatible with ending greenhouse gas emissions? Those are the questions we need to be asking ourselves, because that is what we need to be doing: bringing greenhouse gas emissions to a halt. We need to reflect on whether it is really sustainable to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on building new roads and expanding roads designed to facilitate easy car travel when by 2020 about 60 per cent of our greenhouse gas emissions will come from private car travel.
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