Alan Ferguson (SA, Deputy-President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I have received a letter from Senator Ludlam proposing that a definite matter of public importance be submitted to the Senate for discussion, namely:

The publication of the Australian Conservation Foundation’s Sustainable Cities Index and the urgency of providing for green infrastructure in Australian cities and towns.

I call upon those senators who approve of the proposed discussion to rise in their places.

More than the number of senators required by the standing orders having risen in their places—

I understand that informal arrangements have been made to allocate specific times to each of the speakers in today’s debate. With the concurrence of the Senate, I shall ask the clerks to set the clocks accordingly.

Scott Ludlam (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Australian Conservation Foundation’s Sustainable Cities Index was released this morning. It provides an insightful and quite alarming snapshot of the comparative performance of Australia’s largest cities. It contains 15 different indicators which cover key social, economic and environmental factors. It shows the ability of each city to sustain its population within its environmental means and within overall parameters of amenability and liveability. I suppose the first thing to take away is that this is not simply a list of environmental indicators. This is the footprint and the impact that our cities are having on the biosphere that sustains and supports them. It goes into quite a bit of detail across 15 different indicators.

It deals with environmental performance and looks at indicators around air quality, ecological footprint and so on, and water consumption, quite critically. It looks at quality-of-life indicators using things including proxies for health, transport, unemployment, subjective wellbeing and so on. So it is quite broadly framed. A third category of indicators are around resilience—a key word which I suspect we will hear much more of: climate change steps as identified by the Cities for Climate Protection five milestone process, which we might talk about more later if there is time, public participation rate, education, local food production and so on. So it is a very well rounded set of indicators. It is by no means definitive or exhaustive, but it is to my knowledge the first time that this has ever been tried—to come up with a set of indicators of overall sustainability of our largest settlements and then try to rate Australian cities relative to each other to see how we are collectively doing.

It is based on the best datasets that are available, and in some cases I think some of the important takeaway messages are the gaps in data and information that we do not have or that the Australian Conservation Foundation and its partners did not have when they were collating the material to put this report together. I think some of the more important flow-on impacts might be taking a good look at what information we need to be collecting and doing better at.

Not a single Australian city scored well on the index. All cities are hovering in the middle range and, effectively, what we are measuring here is relative degrees of quite average performance. This is not abstract; this is not something that is academic that means that we just need to do a little bit better next year. This measures the ability of settlements in Australia to survive the challenges, the non-negotiable challenges, of the 21st century. No longer distant challenges, these are issues that are upon us right now and we are sleepwalking into them. One of the most important takeaway findings from this report is that Australian cities, despite 20 or 30 years of the kinds of debates that we have been having in here, are not ready across a very wide range of indicators.

Darwin ranked first with a score of 119. We may hear more from senators from the Territory about that. Zero was given to be the best performance. So even Darwin, which for a variety of reasons performed the best against the kind of metrics that the ACF were measuring, only scored reasonable. Not a single Australian city was good—a world leader. Three Queensland cities came next, with the Sunshine Coast, Brisbane and Townsville being placed second, third and fourth respectively. It starts to show and give credit to some of the extraordinarily good work that is being done. Not just in these cities that ranked very high but also right around Australia there have been initiatives that have been piecemeal but incredibly valuable, and we have to thank those that came from state, local and federal governments and those that came from the community sector, from the non-government sector and from the business community. These initiatives have been piecemeal and uncoordinated, but at least they have saved us from being much worse than we are.

Perth, my own hometown, came last. It came 19th out of 20 cities—because two were ranked equal 14th. That is an alarming outcome for a city that prides itself on its clean, green image and I think, when you get into the nuts and bolts of the detail, it does give credit to the extremely good work that has been done in a couple of areas. It shows overall that the capital of Western Australia is quite simply unprepared for the challenges that it faces. I will go into a little more detail. Perth scored very well on education and on employment, but it had the worst possible score on ecological footprint, which is in itself an amalgam of different indicators, and on transport and on water. We still have among the lowest mode share for public transport of any major Australian community. Despite the fact that we have a world-class heavy rail network, we are missing a vitally important link. Of course, the Australian Greens believe that that could be filled by light rail.

The ecological footprint for Perth, according to the report, is a little over seven hectares per person per year. The EPA State of the Environment report calculated it, using a slightly different methodology, at 14½ hectares per person per year. People say that if the entire world was trying to live the way we do in Australia we would need another three or four planets. That is where that kind of statistic comes from. If we took the global availability of resources—water and so on—per capita, according to some kind of principle of global justice which says every human being on this planet deserves access to the same resources, we would need to be living on less than two hectares per person. Perth, scoring the very worst on this indicator, is somewhere between seven and 14. That is just how far we have to go. That is one of the reasons that we are at the bottom of the list.

We got one of the lowest possible scores for transport. Again, this may be in part an artefact of the data that was used and it gives us some signs that we probably need to collect it better. We do have the highest rate of vehicle ownership in Australia. Australian cities are amongst the least dense and most car dependent of any on the planet. We have been getting away with it because of a long period of cheap oil, quite frankly. We had a huge fright and a near miss a couple of years back when oil prices spiked, and that seems to have been forgotten. When you ask the Commonwealth government, ‘Who is the lead agency on oil depletion and our unique oil vulnerability in Australia?’ nobody seems to know. We are still flying blind.

Western Australia also scores very poorly in water consumption because we seem to have this dependence or institutional reliance on groundwater mining projects and extremely energy intensive water desalination, and there has been very little thought given in WA—apart from some extremely good research over the last few years—to decentralising water infrastructure.

Waste and recycling is not included in this indicator, although it would be incorporated by proxy in the ecological footprint. Again, it points to initiatives like container deposit legislation, which the NT has and which South Australia led with years and years ago, but the Commonwealth government is still baulking and studying to death while a good idea goes begging.

There are ideas that we could be implementing right now so that next year we see not just that the cities change order and we are comparing each other in slightly different ways but that all Australian communities move further up the scale. This is not in order to get some gold star. This is in order to survive the very real imperatives of the 21st century—climate change, oil depletion, water depletion, food and basic expectations of quality of life. At the moment I think we are simply coasting along assuming that things are going to stay the same as they have. That is why we are still seeing budgets brought down at a state and federal level that would have served us very, very well for the 1950s and 1960s but that are grossly mismatched for the challenges that we face today.

One of the things that I would like to conclude with is the Rudd government’s promises of infrastructure spending. For the first time in a generation, we are seeing the Commonwealth getting, in a tentative way, back into the business of urban public transport. This is a subject that is very dear to my heart. But we are still seeing an overwhelming reliance on road funding, on building more roads to get more traffic onto those roads, while continuing to underfund public transport or just assuming that one day the states will get their act together and that there will be something to fund. The Commonwealth can play a role. We are hearing some of the right language but it is not being reflected in the actions, because in the last Commonwealth budget handed down here a couple of weeks ago there was not a single additional dollar for public transport spending anywhere in the country.

What we are seeing instead is this sense of infrastructure being something that mining companies ask for and get. Infrastructure is: ‘Let’s make north-west ports larger. Let’s provide railway infrastructure and expansions for coal companies.’ That is not what the Greens mean when we talk about infrastructure. When we talk about infrastructure we mean survivability, resilience and thriving into the 21st century. In the mining communities in particular that I represent in the north-west of WA, when we are talking infrastructure those communities are actually not demanding larger ports or more expensive housing. They are demanding basic health care, education, transport and telecommunications systems. These are economies that have been stretched to the brink. We are flying in and flying out people to clean schools in Karratha at the moment, and that simply cannot be maintained.

I think people need to be very aware that when the Rudd government uses the word ‘infrastructure’ it appears to mean something very different. When the Greens use that word we mean the infrastructure of sustainability, whether it be light rail in our major cities, whether it be renewable energy infrastructure and smart grids or whether it be basic community health care and education services, which people in our wealthy inner cities certainly take for granted but which the mining centres in Western Australia and other regional communities across the country simply do not take for granted. It is about time everybody were given access to the same opportunities. I commend ACF on producing this report and look forward to seeing how we do next year.

Nigel Scullion (NT, Country Liberal Party, Deputy Leader of the Nationals) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would like to say that I am delighted but not at all surprised, as you would understand, Mr Acting Deputy President Bishop, that Darwin was at the top of the list in terms of air quality, biodiversity and a subjective wellbeing index. If you told most of the people in the pub that they had come top of the subjective wellbeing index they probably would not allow you to participate in the next shout and would help drive you home. It is something that generally describes just how wonderful it is to live in Darwin—a fantastic city in the fantastic Northern Territory. But, sadly, this is where the good news ends.

The comments by Peter Verwer, the Chief Executive of the Property Council of Australia, about Sydney having an antiplanning culture are probably far more applicable to Darwin. In fact, Darwin was ranked not first but second last out of Australia’s capital cities in a KPMG discussion paper that looked at the performance of city planning systems. Planning is an absolutely essential element of staying at the top of the sustainable cities index. It appears that we are far behind in forward planning issues, which include discussions on infrastructure, land release and encouraging investment for the same. It should come as no surprise to Territorians that the people responsible for this completely abysmal performance are in fact the Northern Territory Labor government.

Darwin is the only capital city in Australia that does not have a population growth planning target. It beggars belief. Someone more cynical than I could say that the fact that we cannot even measure how the government is performing in managing and planning for population growth is perhaps why they do not have a target. I quote the KPMG report:

There is substantial reform to be undertaken. For example, there is the need to develop a land supply program and an infrastructure plan, the need to address national policy issues and the establishment of better implementation arrangements across government and with local government.

That sort of advice has been around for some time. How long have these guys been in power? Since 2001. You would reckon that after 10 years in power they would have worked that out by now. But instead there is still no land supply program. There is no plan for infrastructure and there is no plan for population growth. So what have we been doing all this time? If you were having a conversation there would be a long wait before somebody filled that gap.

The report also talks about the gap between the aspirations we have for our cities and the implementation and achievement of targets and outcomes contained in those plans. It would help if we had a plan in Darwin. The Northern Territory government ranked last when it came to actually providing funding for its stated strategic planning objectives, and this reflects the fact that there is no strategic planning framework in place. Over the last five years we have also seen the largest deterioration in housing affordability in Darwin, and I know all those in this place and across parliament are concerned with housing affordability. It is so closely attached to being able to gauge population growth and ensure that we are releasing the right sort of land, as much as anything else. In many of the places that have a lot of tightness in housing affordability, which is particularly the case in the Northern Territory, it is a consequence of poor planning or, in this case, absolutely no planning at all.

To return to the senator’s MPI, whilst congestion is not really a problem in Darwin, at this stage I would agree with Senator Ludlam that greener transport infrastructure is likely to attract people to use public transport more. But before you can fund greener infrastructure you have to have a government that actually plans for population growth and land supply. If those fundamentals are not there then you are never going to get to the final objectives.

It was the federal coalition government that instigated and led the inquiry into the state of our cities so we could better develop into sustainable cities. We did a number of inquiries, and that inquiry into the state our cities and a whole range of subsequent consultancy reports found that a crucial missing element is a clear sustainable cities vision, a coherent framework and concerted action. This government does not appear to give priority to sustainable cities. It is evident that sustainability has not been incorporated across government and more sustainable cities do not appear to be a policy priority or a shared purpose of this government.

In an example of the government’s haphazard approach, Peter Garrett gave away insulation to homes and rental properties whilst Julia Gillard built ‘schools for the 21st century’. One in 10 of these schools does not utilise building insulation, one in four fails to use energy efficient lighting and more than half ignore energy efficient glazing. So the proof is in the pudding. Next year low-income and disadvantaged households will be able to apply for ‘Green Start’ funding to improve the energy and water efficiency of their homes, yet the new buildings constructed through the National Rental Affordability Scheme are not required to feature sustainability attributes. There have been plenty of opportunities and this government has simply squandered them. There has been short-term investment in infrastructure but the government has simply emptied the bank.

By contrast, the coalition have recognised the great sustainable cities public policy challenges and we have responded with a clear embrace of the constructive, collaborative and positive role that the Commonwealth can play. This was backed up in a very practical sense by the appointment of a cross-portfolio and whole-of-government shadow minister for sustainable cities, my esteemed colleague Bruce Billson. Population and sustainability are separate sides of the same strategic policy coin. Viewing it in this way will promote mature debate and increase accountability.

Cities are the overwhelmingly dominant characteristic of population settlement in Australia and, as Senator Ludlam indicated, this really needs to be a particular focus of our attention. The Australian government, I believe, has a crucial role to play in securing more sustainable cities because it determines policy settings that actually have a major impact on our cities. It also has the resources and points of leverage that can better align support for more sustainable cities, and that is why the coalition has embraced a cross-portfolio approach led by my esteemed colleague Bruce Billson. The Northern Territory and federal Labor governments need to take note: those who fail to plan, plan to fail.

Louise Pratt (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I welcome this debate, because our communities and cities are the places where the climate rubber hits the road. Community action on climate change, as the ACF report shows, can save energy, save time and save money. More sustainable cities can enhance the Australian way of life. Sustainable cities mean less travelling time and more time with families. They mean reduced energy costs and reduced water bills. They ease the strain on family finances. They mean more pleasant, efficient and convenient environments to live, work, learn and play in.

As the ACF’s report shows, there is a significant amount of work being done by many cities across Australia to reduce their carbon footprint. There are indicators related to air quality, green buildings, water and climate change, and the ACF’s report shows many cities are indeed doing their bit to make their local communities more sustainable. But the report also shows that there is still a great deal of work to do across Australia in the area of climate change and energy efficiency. As ACF head Don Henry said this morning:

… our cities can do a lot better to be more sustainable.

From my point of view, this means things like using less water and energy in schools, workplaces and homes. It means relying more on public transport. It means walking and cycling rather than getting into your car.

The Australian government remains committed to taking action on climate change and to making Australia more energy efficient. The implementation of the enhanced renewable energy target will provide greater certainty for large-scale renewable energy developers as well as households who want to take action to reduce their emissions. Legislation to implement the enhanced renewable energy target will be debated in the parliament this fortnight. The RET will see nearly $19 billion worth of investment in clean energy in this nation by 2030.

We also have a commitment of $650 million to the Renewable Energy Future Fund. This funding will provide additional support for the development and deployment of large- and small-scale renewable energy projects and enhance the take-up of industrial, commercial and residential energy efficiency. These projects are going to have a major impact on Australia’s cities. The Rudd government has also established the Australian Carbon Trust and is supporting its work to help businesses to take action to improve their energy efficiency. Earlier this month, the government also announced the first commercial-scale smart grid, which will be based in Newcastle, New South Wales. It is a demonstration project that will lead Australia in advances in energy management. It is about modernising the electricity network, helping people to save energy and connecting renewables into the grid. It is about engaging the community to take action on climate change.

So you can see here that we are implementing an integrated range of policies aimed at improving energy efficiency of homes, appliances, equipment and lighting. It is about giving families more confidence in the purchasing decisions that they are making. The government is also implementing a national program to improve the energy efficiency of Australia’s largest office buildings through providing better information and funding leading-edge green buildings.

I welcome the ACF’s sustainable city index as a vital contribution to the ongoing national discussion about taking action on the state of Australia’s cities. I do not agree with the all the report’s findings, and I think this is in part because there are some gaps in the data. Nevertheless, it is important that we look at and debate the questions that this report raises. And, yes, it is even more important that we act with a sense of urgency on the enormous challenges that confront Australians who live, learn and work in our cities, and indeed on the biodiversity challenges that exist within Australia’s urban landscapes.

It is important to note that the ACF’s document is not only about our environmental footprint and the natural environment but also about a range of other important factors. It is about our quality of life and our communities’ resilience. For each of these performance indicators, data has been collected on a range of important subissues. So, to highlight, for example, community resilience, the ACF has brought together some pretty important issues such as our capacity to adapt to climate change, public participation, education, food production and household repayments.

So when you look at Perth’s vulnerability to the impacts of climate change combined with the high levels of household debt attached to our booming property market, our high levels of food imports and the busy lifestyles so common in Perth, you can easily see how Perth has a low rating, when compared to others, on a resilience score. While I am not sure this rating is entirely fair, as there is a lot being done to address these issues in my home city, it is, nevertheless, great to see this index fostering a healthy rivalry between cities—a rivalry that encourages all our cities to lift their performance on sustainability. I know that the people of Perth will see this report as providing renewed impetus to get in there and get things done and to put the city on a more sustainable footing.

Many people have been working hard now over many years to get Perth to look at its sustainability issues. The former Minister for Planning and Infrastructure, and now federal candidate for Canning, has done a great deal of work on this front. The Gallop-Carpenter governments built the Mandurah rail line and have worked very hard to promote nodes of development along existing transport hubs. This was about increasing urban density in places where there are existing services, and that was something that Alannah MacTiernan led the way on.

The work of the Labor government was directed at undoing the legacy of many years of poor planning. It aimed to reverse the negative trends of the past by putting transit oriented development at the forefront. This means locating moderate- to high-intensity commercial, mixed use, community and residential development close to train stations and/or high-frequency bus routes to encourage public transport use over private vehicles. There are many benefits to this approach and they include: improving the attractiveness of and access to public transport, cycling and walking; providing communities with interesting and vibrant places for people to interact in and to visit; reducing the impact of transport on the environment; reducing household travelling expenses; and providing more housing diversity and affordable housing options.

Since the 1950s, Perth’s urban sprawl has become more dependent on the private motor vehicle than most other cities around the world. Perth therefore generates more CO2 compared to cities with a more compact urban development pattern. So it is easy to see how, on some of the indicators highlighted by the ACF, Perth might score badly. But it is a challenge that the previous Labor government in Western Australia was working very hard to address.

Transit oriented development helps address the issues of climate change by providing people with choices of lifestyles and personal travel that directly or indirectly reduce the use of fossil fuels and thus the emission of CO2. In the coming years, the world’s declining oil reserves will significantly impact on many aspects of Perth’s social and economic structures, in particular its dependence on vehicles. Already, the days of cheap conventional oil are in the past, and it is expected that the demand for oil will eventually outstrip supply. In Perth it is vital that we provide walking and cycling options and a more efficient public transport system across the city to reduce the impact of declining oil reserves. So, concepts such as activity centres and higher residential densities along high-frequency public transport routes are vital ways for our city to reduce vehicle dependence.

There are complex and interrelated issues that impact on the sustainability of Australian cities. These were considered in some depth in the government’s State of Australian cities 2010 report released by Infrastructure Australia, in March this year. This report was produced in recognition of the paucity of national information on economic, environmental, social and demographic indicators relating to our cities. The systematic data collection on which the report is based reveals key trends in the development of our cities and provides a platform of knowledge to facilitate the development and implementation of future urban policies.

This report makes clear that effective action on the challenges facing our major cities will require the cooperation of the community, of business and of all levels of government—local, state and federal. It identifies a wide array of challenges. Given the scope of the challenges facing our cities, there is a vital role for the federal government. We must provide leadership, coordination and funding for large-scale projects that can make a real difference to the sustainability, productivity and liveability of our cities. It is a role that our predecessors—those opposite—were reluctant to take up. In government they avoided this challenge, as they did so many other challenges.

The state of the cities report signals that the Rudd government is willing to tackle this challenge, as it has done on many other hard issues The report sets the scope and context for the Rudd government’s renewed commitment to urban policy and planning, particularly in relation to the need for new infrastructure. For too long, myriad government departments have been involved in these issues with no plan for action, no plan to make our cities more sustainable and more liveable. With the election of the Rudd government, that changed. We do have a plan for green infrastructure and we are taking urgent action. We are, for the first time in the nation’s history, making record investment in public transport and green energy infrastructure. In fact, the Rudd government has committed to the first significant federal investment in urban public transport in the nation’s history. Our Nation Building Program provides some $4.5 billion in funding for metropolitan rail projects in our major cities. That warrants repeating: for the first time ever we have a record national investment in public transport, including rail. The Rudd government takes the sustainability of our cities and the quality of life of urban Australians very seriously. Our Major Cities Unit and our energy and infrastructure investment mean that we are, for the first time in the Australia’s history, tackling the very issues raised by the ACF in its index report. We are making just the kinds of investment in green energy infrastructure necessary to get us on a sustainable footing. Yes, it is important to act and, yes, it is urgent.

Again, I welcome the ACF’s constructive contribution to this issue. Federal, state and local governments; communities and community groups and businesses and individuals must all get on with making our cities more sustainable. Hand in hand with making them more sustainable, they will be better places to live, learn, work and play. I am pleased to have had an opportunity to contribute to this debate today.

Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern and Remote Australia) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My colleagues in the Senate will forgive me if I express in this matter of public importance debate a little pride in the results of the Australian Conservation Foundation’s Sustainable Cities Index survey. Townsville and Darwin, two of Australia’s northernmost cities, have come in first and third overall in this assessment. They lead the way in many areas. I think that indicates that, as in other areas, Northern Australia leads the way and should be recognised as such across the board of government influence. I also say with some pride that the capital city of my state, Brisbane, has featured very well, as has another significant city in the state of Queensland, the Sunshine Coast. There is a common theme running through these successful cities, and that is they have good governance at local, state and federal level. For example, Townsville’s results are in no small way a credit to the mayor, Councillor Les Tyrell, and the deputy mayor, Councillor David Crisafulli—who, I mention in passing with some pride, just happened to work for me once upon a time. Brisbane has done well because of the work of Can-do Campbell Newman, the Lord Mayor of Brisbane—another Liberal, I might add. Sunshine Coast has a great leader in Councillor Bob Abbot. Of course, all of the federal seats in that area are held by good positive members—Warren Truss, Alex Somlyay and Peter Slipper—and the other seat in that area, Longman, will shortly be represented by an up-and-coming, very able young fellow by the name of Wyatt Roy. I will come back to that later. All of the state members on the Sunshine Coast are members of the Liberal National Party. There is a common theme there.

I will look quickly at some of the individual rankings. Darwin was ranked first on employment opportunities. Why would that be? Because of two factors mainly. The huge resource of mining makes employment in Darwin so positive, but what is the Rudd government going to do about that? It is going to destroy the mining industry with this great big new tax and that, in future surveys, will have an impact on Darwin. The other thing for Darwin is that it is the location of a military enterprise. A lot of the employment opportunities in Darwin rotate off the defence commitment in that area. Darwin also ranked high in household payments. Why? Because a lot of the income of the Northern Territory, and Darwin in particular, comes from the mining industry; an industry that Mr Rudd seems determined to destroy in Australia. Darwin ranked sixth in food production. This is because the people of the Northern Territory—indeed, the people of Northern Australia—understand that more can be done to supply fresh food from the north of Australia because of our abundant supply of water.

Townsville did very well in biodiversity, and that I think is principally because of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, which was set up by the Fraser Liberal government, and the green zones on the Barrier Reef, which were an initiative of the Howard Liberal government. Townsville ranked well in employment. For what reason? Three mine-processing activities—zinc, copper and nickel—are located in Townsville, and these again are supported by an industry that Mr Rudd wants to destroy with his great big new tax on mining.

Another reason Townsville did well was because of the Solar Cities program. That was a program initiated by the Howard government and fought for by Peter Lindsay, the Liberal member for the seat of Herbert. His good work there will be carried on by Ewen Jones, who I think everyone expects will become the next member for Herbert. Again Townsville ranked well with household repayments. Why? It is because of the fly-in fly-out from Townsville, supported by the mining industry which Mr Rudd wants to destroy with his great big new tax on mining. Townsville also benefits because it is the site of Australia’s largest defence establishment.

The Sunshine Coast did well on the subject of wellbeing. I can well understand that. One of the reasons it ranked well in food production is that fortuitously the Liberal-National Party in Queensland led the charge against the establishment of the Traveston Crossing dam against the Labor government, who were returned to office with support of the Greens political party. Wyatt Roy, who I mentioned before, comes from a family that has been involved in horticulture in that Sunshine Coast hinterland. It is that sort of access to fresh food that has seen the Sunshine Coast do so well there.

In Brisbane a lot of their high ranking in the biodiversity area is the responsibility of the Brisbane City Council. I might mention that Councillor Jane Prentice, who will be coming to Canberra hopefully as the member for Ryan, had a significant role to play in establishing Brisbane as the green city it is.

On a negative note, and time is escaping me, I did want to mention the other significant North Queensland city of Cairns. It has been taken down in the overall rankings because its employment is so atrocious under the Rudd government. It was the Rudd government that destroyed a very viable shipbuilding industry in Cairns, causing huge unemployment. It was the Rudd government that introduced the passenger movement charges that have had a lot to do with making things difficult in the tourism industry. For those reasons, unfortunately Cairns rated poorly overall. But all in all, it is a good result for Queensland and a great result for northern Australia.

Catryna Bilyk (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would like to start my contribution by thanking the Australian Conservation Foundation for the excellent work they do in producing the sustainable cities index. It is important to note that the index is not just a measure of environmental sustainability, not that I wish to diminish the importance of measuring environmental outcomes, but also a measure of the quality of life and resilience of cities. It provides a holistic overview of the health of our cities and how smart our cities are in meeting the challenges of the 21st century. It is a useful tool to measure how we are tracking not only at all three levels of government—federal, state and local government—but as a community and society in continuing to make our cities livable into the future.

I am personally pleased that the capital city of my home state of Tasmania, Hobart, has been placed a respectable sixth amongst the 20 cities whose sustainability was assessed by the ACF. However, I do not think anyone in this place would disagree that there is much more we can do to improve the sustainability of our cities. As ACF head Don Henry said this morning, our cities can do a lot better to be more sustainable. This could include measures such as using less water and less energy and relying more on public transport than cars.

In regard to the MPI today, it is easy for Senator Ludlam and his colleagues in the Australian Greens to take the high moral ground on this issue, as they do with so many other issues. It is easy for them to preach as if they are the messiahs of the environment and to pretend they possess the only social conscience within this parliament. It is easy from a place where you are not governing, nor offering a real prospect of being the alternative government, to say that something is a priority and more needs to be done. It is easy when you do not have to prepare a budget, you do not have to juggle spending priorities and you do not have to be accountable for the outcomes of the decisions you make. That is what the government is about. The Rudd Labor government takes the issues of the health, resilience and environmental sustainability of our cities very seriously.

I would like to mention some of the social indicators measured by the index before addressing the issue of environmental sustainability. One measure I would particularly like to mention is employment. If there is one thing we know about the unemployment rate, it is that it would be much higher had the federal opposition had their way. Let us not forget that, had it not been for the economic stimulus package opposed by those opposite, hundreds of thousands of Australians who are employed now would either have lost their jobs or not found employment. The sustainability of Australian cities in terms of employment could have been much worse had the Rudd government not taken decisive action in dealing with the effects of the global financial crisis.

The Rudd government is working hard on initiatives that address a number of other social indicators measured by the ACF’s sustainable cities index. On public participation, we are addressing this through our Volunteer Grants Program, which contributes to the cost of training courses, equipment and fuel for volunteers. This program helps support our hardworking volunteers and builds social inclusion and community participation throughout Australian communities, including our sustainable cities. In education we are boosting year 12 completion rates by building trade training centres across Australia which will help address skill shortages in traditional trades and emerging industries—unlike those opposite, who want to stop the building of the trade training centres. This will help boost employment.

In transport we are rolling out billions of dollars in road and rail infrastructure which will help reduce congestion and therefore have the added environmental benefit of reducing Australia’s carbon emissions. A great example of this is in my home state of Tasmania, the Kingston bypass, which coincidentally happens to be about halfway between my office and my home, so it is a road that I will be travelling every day and it is a road I now travel every day with some congestion on it. The Kingston bypass is jointly funded by the Tasmanian and Australian governments. It is a great project and it will be featuring bike lanes and a park-and-ride facility to encourage alternatives to vehicular transport to the city. In Australia’s fastest-growing local government area, these are very important initiatives.

There are a number of programs being progressed by the Rudd government that address the environmental sustainability of our cities. The Australian government’s Solar Cities program is designed to trial new sustainable models for electricity supply and use, and it is being implemented in seven separate electricity grid-connected areas around Australia. It is administered by the Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency, in partnership with local and state governments, industry, business and local communities. Australia’s solar cities are Adelaide, Alice Springs, Blacktown, Central Victoria, Moreland, Perth and Townsville. Each solar city integrates a unique combination of energy options, such as energy efficiency measures for homes and businesses, the use of solar technologies, cost reflective pricing trials to reward people who use energy wisely, and community education about better energy usage in an increasingly energy reliant world.

The Rudd government has committed $650 million to the Renewable Energy Future Fund, which will provide additional support for the development and deployment of large- and small-scale renewable energy projects and enhance take-up of industrial, commercial and residential energy efficiency. We are also establishing the Australian Carbon Trust and supporting its work to help businesses take action to improve their energy efficiency. Earlier this month Senator Wong, the Minister for Climate Change, Energy Efficiency and Water, announced that the first commercial-scale smart grid will be based in Newcastle, New South Wales. This demonstration project will lead to Australia-wide advances in energy management. It will modernise the electricity network, help people save energy, connect renewables to the grid and engage the community in action on climate change.

The Rudd government has also developed an integrated range of policies aimed at improving the energy efficiency of homes, appliances, equipment and lighting to allow householders to give families more confidence about the purchasing decisions that they are making. And we are implementing a national program to improve the energy efficiency of Australia’s largest office buildings, through providing better information and funding leading-edge green buildings. These examples are just a snapshot of the initiatives that the Rudd government has delivered or will be delivering to help make our cities more sustainable.

While government programs are important, we could make substantial progress by putting in place market mechanisms that encourage the businesses and households within our cities to operate more sustainably. The Rudd government has proposed two market based schemes to help make this happen: the Enhanced Renewable Energy Target, or the enhanced RET, and the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, commonly known as the CPRS. The implementation of the enhanced RET will provide greater certainty for large-scale renewable energy developers as well as households wanting to take action to reduce emissions. The RET will help drive nearly $19 billion of investment in clean renewable energy by 2030. As for the CPRS, we have unfortunately been forced into a situation where we have no choice but to delay the introduction of the scheme because of the intransigence of some members of the Senate.

By voting down the CPRS, the federal opposition and the Australian Greens have voted to guarantee that Australia will fail to meet its international obligations in addressing the serious threat of climate change. If Senator Ludlum were serious about helping to reduce the carbon footprint of our cities—if he were serious about helping our cities to become more sustainable and contribute to tackling climate change—then he would urge his colleagues in the Australian Greens to pass the CPRS at the earliest opportunity. The CPRS is the most economically efficient means that Australia has of reducing our greenhouse gas emissions while meeting the government’s proposed greenhouse gas reduction targets. It is hypocritical of the Greens to talk about sustainable cities and yet act to delay meaningful action on climate change. Their action places them in the same camp on this issue as the climate change sceptics and the climate change deniers in the federal opposition.

Judith Troeth (Victoria, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It gives me great pleasure to speak on this matter of public importance today. Cities that are lauded for their sustainability contain a number of characteristics, such as economic prosperity, social energy, the robust use of resources, lifestyle opportunities and appealing and functional urban habitats. In my home state of Victoria, the Australian Conservation Foundation, which produced the sustainable cities index, have ranked 20 of Australia’s biggest cities and towns. Those in Victoria ranked seventh, which was the CBD of Melbourne; 10th, Bendigo; equal 14th, Ballarat; and 18th, Geelong. Melbourne and Bendigo were considered mid-table performers in the index, and Ballarat and Geelong were poor performers. Their low rankings were attributed to lower density, transport and employment, which placed Ballarat in the lowest-quality-of-life basket. Geelong rated poorly in health, as approximately 5.3 per cent of the population of Geelong is registered as having type 2 diabetes. This highlights the lack of emphasis that the state Labor government have on investing in sustainable living in Victoria. The same could also be said of the Rudd Labor government, and it was interesting to note in the announcement of the recent federal health reforms that the number of new beds in Victoria is barely adequate to cover the existing shortfall and we will need 187 new beds in hospitals in Victoria to cope with rising population.

Unlike the coalition, the Rudd Labor government has failed to create a portfolio position for sustainable cities, whereas my esteemed colleague Mr Bruce Billson from the other place is the shadow minister for sustainable cities. Therefore, we can only imagine that Prime Minister Rudd attaches no priority to sustainable cities. In fact, what he has done is indulge in reckless spending which has emptied the bank and failed to position Australia and our cities for a more sustainable future. The environment portfolio was giving away insulation to homeowners and rental properties, while the education portfolio, which is supposed to be building schools for the 21st century, is building schools where, as my colleague Senator Scullion remarked, one in 10 do not utilise building insulation, one in four do not use energy efficient lighting and more than half ignore energy efficient glazing.

I noticed in today’s Australian that Mr Rudd lists the key achievements of his first term as the education revolution and the remake of the hospitals and health system. What a failure they have been! Sustainability is not on the radar for this government, nor is it a policy priority. But it is not just Prime Minister Rudd who has an apparent disregard for this; the Brumby Labor government in Victoria has a similar disdain. There are great opportunities in Bendigo, Ballarat and Geelong. They are wonderful cities and they deserve to be served better so that people find them a desirable place to live and work.

In Melbourne, where I live, traffic congestion—and if Senator Bilyk thinks she has traffic congestion in Hobart she should see it in Melbourne—low water levels and storage deficiencies, energy demand pressures, sprawling suburbs, underperforming and overcrowded public transport and work and family life dislocation are adversely affecting the sustainability of the city, relegating it to seventh on the list. Let us take, for instance, underperforming and overcrowded public transport. We have a cartoon from some four or five years ago on the wall in my office which shows railway commuters clinging to railway carriages, some of them travelling on the roof. This cartoon is yellowed and faded, but exactly the same thing still operates. At the station where I get on the train, on occasions you are lucky to force your way into the train. It is a bit like the way travelling on Japanese transport has been portrayed. The myki ticketing system, which was due to come out some 18 months ago at a cost of $400 million, is now well over the $1 billion mark and still heading skywards. In the meantime we have seen very few tickets.

The forecast population explosion will only make these matters worse. If Australia gets a population of 35 million people by 2050 we are going to be looking at these problems yet again. For instance, when my esteemed former colleague Jeff Kennett was Premier of Victoria there was a considerable amount of criticism directed towards his government for alienating 2,000 hectares of green wedge land for urban development. Since 2002 the Bracks-Brumby Labor government has alienated 55,000 hectares of green wedge land around Melbourne for urban development, a great deal more.

Innovative thinking is required by industry, local government, unions, community organisations and state and federal governments, and I would like to give a good example of what can be done. In my home state of Victoria in 2000 Mr Terry White met with representatives of the North Central Catchment Management Authority, the Department of Natural Resources and Environment and La Trobe University at Bendigo to create the first greenhouse alliance organisation in Victoria. The Central Victorian Greenhouse Alliance, CVGA, is an incorporated organisation that includes councils, governments, local community groups and local businesses, covering 20 per cent of Victoria. They are the ones who take full responsibility for their contributions to climate change and lead their communities by example, and they make this transition in a way that is profitable and practical. I can only hope that an incoming Baillieu government in Victoria will lead the way in encouraging grassroots examples of this sort, which will make our nation sustainable and green in a way which it has not been up till now. My colleague the Hon. Bruce Billson has been working hard on this.

Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to make a few brief comments on the sustainable cities index and the need for government to consider it in a good deal of detail. The problem we have here is the interface between state and federal legislation and responsibilities and local government responsibilities and the interface between the imperatives of the 21st century for sustainability and resilience and the old-fashioned ways of thinking about infrastructure and development. If you approach this in an old-fashioned way and just talk about wanting more people, cities growing, therefore putting in more infrastructure, doing things the way we have always done them—with roads, with petrol engine vehicles, with private versus public transport—you are going to end up with completely unsustainable cities.

Let us assume for a moment that petrol and oil were $200 a barrel tomorrow. Are our cities resilient? Are they sustainable? The answer is no. The Rudd government continue to apply pressure to free up cheap land, supposedly, at the edge of cities, without putting in place the public transport infrastructure to service it. In places like Western Sydney there is still no public transport.

What about climate change? When there are extreme heat conditions, as we have experienced in summers of recent years—and this year could well be the hottest on record—public transport goes out because of, in some cases, buckling of railway tracks. There are also power outages. Equally, cities rush to put in place temporary morgues. In Adelaide they had to put in place a temporary morgue, as they did in Victoria. That was because of the heatwave conditions and the extreme stress it put particularly on the elderly and vulnerable in our communities. So we are not prepared for this.

In Tasmania we do not have a planning system that is adequate to integrate all the different areas, for example, in the south of the state. Whilst there is now a move to have a southern integrated transport plan and a southern regional planning initiative, they are still in draft form. We still do not have the shape of the city in the future. If you do not have that shape then you cannot plan the transport infrastructure or the water infrastructure you need.

In Tasmania one of the biggest problems is a lack of energy efficiency in terms of our built environment. This is a major problem and it was identified in the assessment of Hobart. Green building was very low on the list because of it. That has been the case because the Housing Industry Association and the Master Builders Association have resisted higher standards. Tasmania is one of the states holding back the whole nation when it comes to standards for new housing and new commercial buildings in terms of energy efficiency. What we need is a much greater commitment to recognising the challenges of climate change and peak oil, recognising that planning has to be integrated between local, state and federal government and recognising that the infrastructure of the future has to address those imperatives, not some imperative that economists have declared as being the ones we need to look at in terms of growth. We need to look at sustainability in terms of the environment.

Guy Barnett (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Chairman of the Scrutiny of Government Waste Committee) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! The time for the consideration of the matter of public importance has expired.