Duncan Kerr (Denison, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

In responding to the report Sustainability for survival: creating a climate for change, perhaps I might acknowledge the significant contribution of both the Chair of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Environment and Heritage, the Hon. Mal Washer, and the member for Scullin, who has performed an estimable task not just during this committee but, I understand from corridor conversation, in his nearly 20 years as a continuing member of the environment committee—and he will achieve that 20-year milestone if this parliament extends to its longest possible term. When we reflect upon this document, it is important to recognise that it is simply a recognition that the environmental footprint imposed upon Australia has been most heavy in those parts of urban settlement along the eastern coast, along the coastal zones, and that the vast majority of Australians live in cities. It is also where the greatest environmental pressures and demands are placed. Failure to deal in a comprehensive and cross-portfolio way with those pressures and demands is to condemn most of our other long-term aspirations—including those relating to climate change, clean water and energy efficiency—to failure.

When the committee set upon its task early in this parliament and developed its report for sustainable cities, it did so in a way that recognised the fundamental importance of this area of policy for future governments. I do think it is somewhat sad that the current Minister for the Environment and Water Resoucres, Minister Turnbull, who played a very constructive and engaged role as a member of the committee and made some considerable intellectual input into its framing and its strategies, has not responded to the publication of the committee’s report since it was brought down some two years ago. As the member for Scullin has pointed out, we still await a response from the government in relation to this landmark report.

That has led to the further report to the parliament from the charter inquiry, which was tabled just recently. In that regard, the starting point of recommendation is that, in the next parliament, whoever is to be Minister for the Environment and Water Resources introduce a bill for an act to establish a statutory national sustainability commission headed by a sustainability commissioner. I am not certain of the reason for the current minister not having progressed his thinking in relation to this report. It may be that he is thwarted by his cabinet colleagues. That seems to me to be a likely scenario, given the government’s head-in-the-sand approach in relation to a whole range of other environmental issues. It may be that the minister is overwhelmed with his own political survival, with a lot of other pressures that have come upon him in relation to climate change and, more latterly, the debate about a pulp mill in Tasmania, and he has not focused his formidable intellectual talent on the sustainability of our cities. But, whatever is the motivating reason, it is unfortunate that we have not reached a point where the government has put on the table its response to one of the most significant reports of a parliamentary committee that has been generated from the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Environment and Heritage in the 20 years that the member for Scullin has been a member of this committee and in the 20 years that I have served as a member of this parliament.

There can be no real progress on the major issues that affect our environment in this country unless we address in an effective, comprehensive and coordinated way the issues that the sustainability charter would have us address. You need only go in brief to the issues referred to in this report to recognise the nature of the issues that are arrayed before us as we live in our urban environment. We need to address the built environment, including the cost of construction, land utilisation, building materials, energy utilisation and energy efficiency. We need to deal with the supply of water to our cities, the use of waterways and their maintenance; discharge and reduction; and the reduction of energy use with the distribution and maintenance of its supply. We need to look at energy as a provider of all the services that we rely on for the household comfort we take for granted, in order to make certain that we draw down less on unsustainable yields and abate greenhouse emissions and that we build together a framework that allows us to join with other nations in dealing with the challenges of climate change.

We need to look at transport—not just the emissions of motor vehicles but also our road systems, our public transport provision—and at making certain that cities become liveable. Without that, we simply do not have an effective response to one of the key ingredients of our contribution to global warming. We need to look at the economics of our administration of our cities, the management of our waste streams, and we also have to look at the health impacts of our planning for urban living.

These are integrated, comprehensive issues that we shy away from to our great detriment. This committee had the foresight to put forward the recommendations that it did in its last report. It did so with a degree of delight and it recognised with a degree of delight when a former member of this committee became the minister for the environment. In fact, if members care to look at the photograph that is on the wall in relation to this committee, we deliberately invited the minister, as a former member of this committee, to take part in that photograph simply because it recognised the contribution he had made. But that contribution stopped when he became a member of the executive. For two years, we simply had silence on one of the most significant of those challenges that Australia faces. Alongside the skills crisis and the education crisis, we have this crisis of inaction in responding to a principal report of the House of Representatives on an issue that ought to be at the forefront of every member’s mind because every member shares a common interest in making certain that the success of our community is not lost as we fail to grapple with the overarching and interlinked challenges of what is an increasingly unsustainable form of urban design and an unsustainable form of ignorance of the challenges that we face in building a better and more sustainable framework for future policy.

With those few remarks I am content to simply put this document on the record. Plainly it will not be implemented by this government in the current parliament. The government has had ample time to respond, to put down the building blocks of what it might have seen as a sustainability charter. The work is to be left to future parliaments. I am happy to yield the balance of my time to the incoming minister for the environment, who I trust will give greater priority to the need to develop the charter that is recommended by the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Environment and Heritage and place it where it should be—at the centre of Australian government policymaking.

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