Sharryn Jackson (Hasluck, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I first congratulate the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts, and indeed the rest of the Rudd Labor government, for taking initiatives in this budget to finally and genuinely tackle climate change. I understand that there is well over $2.3 billion to reduce greenhouse emissions, invest in renewable energy and assist industry and the community to meet this fundamental environmental and economic challenge.

I am particularly interested in the question of funding for the Solar Cities program. Minister Garrett, you may recollect that in August last year on a beautiful sunshiny day you visited in the electorate of Hasluck the city of Midland, which is the central regional city for the Swan Valley. The City of Swan, along with four other local councils, had applied for funding under the Solar Cities program to make Perth a solar city and had been unsuccessful under the previous government. One of the election commitments that were made was for $13.9 million in funding to go towards this project to help make Perth a solar city.

The first such funding is to be received in WA, and we are very excited about it. I am keen to ensure that this budget and the appropriation cater for the Perth solar city project, which I think will be an extremely exciting one, working not only with local councils in my area but also with the Western Australian state government to look at and provide climate change solutions. It is a huge project. It has a considerable amount of support across the community. It involves a substantial community engagement period. It will also see home energy assessments being done in a number of houses and the introduction and rollout of smart metering.

We also hope that not only will there be participants from state and local governments but also owner-occupiers and public-private tenants will come on board. We see it as an opportunity for innovative financing and production subsidies to boost our solar energy technologies, as well as a number of demonstration projects, both in commercial buildings and public facilities and schools. We believe the project will be a success and indeed, in the second stage, will move to a self-funding phase. As part and parcel of the project, we have included an ongoing monitoring strategy with the assistance of Murdoch University and Western Power.

This project has a strong community focus, includes both new and existing homes and will work with both owner-occupiers and rental properties as well as local schools, which we hope will participate as solar schools. We believe that we will have something like 6,000 homes and businesses participate in the trial. We believe that, if this project is kicked off with funding from the federal government, we will deliver greenhouse gas emission reductions of more than 15,000 tonnes, which is equivalent to taking 3½ thousand large vehicles off the road, and will cut energy use equivalent to the needs of 3,200 homes.

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