Toni and I both attended a forum run by the Conservation Council of WA and co-sponsored by the Australian Conservation Foundation, the World Wildlife Fund and the Wilderness Society.
To kick things off, representatives from the peak environmental groups had an opportunity to talk about what they saw as being the most critical environmental issues in this election campaign.
It was then the turn of representatives from each of the major political parties to talk about the approach of their respective parties to these issues and to answer questions from the almost 100 people in the audience.
Sadly, the Liberal Party did not deem the event important enough to send along the shadow environment minister and sent along Ray Halligan, MLC for the North Metropolitan region. Mr Halligan admitted to not being fully briefed on the environmental policy of his party, and drew gasps from the audience when he admitted that he thought that the jury was still out on the cause of climate change.
Minister for the Environment, David Templeman did a considerably better job and showed that he was well informed on most of the issues. He was unable however to justify the continued construction of new coal-fired power stations.
The Labor party has made a number of significant environmental announcements during this election campaign, which appear to be impressive at face value.
For example, discounts on the third party insurance for low emissions vehicles, free insulation for 20,000 low income households and a gross feed-in tariff of $0.60/kWH for households installing solar panels on their roofs. These are all excellent initiatives, and I support them whole-heartedly. Combined, they will have the impact of removing more than 50,000 tonnes of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere each year.
However it is worth putting them into perspective. One coal-fired power station produces almost 3,000,000 tonnes of greenhouse gases per year. There are two new coal-fired power stations under construction, and more in the pipeline.
So, just one of these new power stations will completely offset the benefits of three of Labor’s biggest green election announcements with less than one weeks worth of production!!
And don’t think that the Liberal Party is any different. It isn’t.
Both Liberal and Labor are committed to continuing our reliance on coal as a source of electricity. This is simply unacceptable.