Event
Date
Speaking notes for Jon Stanhope, Chief Minister, Australian Capital Territory
Presented at the MCH Weekend of Ideas Science and Ethics, March 2003.
Sebastian Clark — President, Manning Clark House.
I acknowledge the Ngunnawal people, the traditional owners of this land. I respect their continuing culture and the contribution they make to the life of this region. Their long – and sustainable – relationship with the land, and their enduring sense of identity since European settlement hold lessons for all of us who seek sustainability.
Ladies and gentlemen, we come together today to share ideas. This is a city born out of an idea, and it is a city that in the future will prosper or fail on the quality of its ideas.
Ideas are the currency that will deliver the sustainable city each of us dreams of inhabiting.
The concept of sustainable development hit the international scene with the report of the Bruntland Commission in the 1980s.
These days, the term has an elasticity that stretches to embrace the social and economic impact of our decisions, as well as environmental considerations, in an integrated whole.
To give an example, when the ACT Government speaks these days about the need to rebuild sustainable communities in the villages obliterated in the 2003 bushfires, it isn’t just speaking of environmental sustainability, but social and economic sustainability. It is talking about a systems approach, where one or other of these forms of sustainability might be traded off against another, for a myriad reasons, but where the aim is to achieve an ultimate, long-term balance.
Sustainability is an ideal but it is also a journey. The real-life social, economic and environmental parameters within which we operate will always force us to compromise on that ideal. That’s why the ideas we produce must be creative ideas, growing out of a spirit of innovation rather than ideology.
There are things we are stuck with here in Canberra — our historic sprawl, the infrastructure that has been devoted to the cult of the car, an ageing stock of cheaply built housing that is ill-adapted to the climate, our narrow revenue base, and the paradox inherent in the label ‘bush capital’.
We cannot knock it all down and start again. We wouldn’t want to. But we can, in pursuit of sustainability, work better with what we have, put our existing infrastructure to better use — retrofit the city.
We can do what Actew is doing right now, pumping 20 megalitres a day from the Cotter to the Googong Dam, using existing infrastructure, with plans to eventually pump 150 megalitres a day. An idea, a creative idea, sustainability in action.
The economic and environmental benefits are clear-cut: better use of existing infrastructure, and a delay in the need to make the huge financial and environmental investment that would result from flooding the Naas Valley. The social benefits are equally obvious: without water, there is no life. A reliable supply of water is a precondition for a sustainable city.
But, as I said, sustainability demands a systems approach. That’s why the creative thinking going on in Actew is complemented by comprehensive government policies like Think water act water, with its ambitious targets for reducing water consumption, and its initiatives for changing the behaviour or every Canberran who ever turns on a tap.
Sustainability will never be achieved without behavioural change, and behavioural change will never be real and permanent without attitudinal change.
The head of our Sustainability Expert Reference Group, Professor Brian Roberts, from whom you will hear shortly, makes it abundantly clear that sustainability involves making choices, balancing interests, and taking risks.
Some of those choices are nothing short of revolutionary. Who could have anticipated, 20 years ago, that we’d be recycling more than three quarters of our household waste? Or that by sheer determination, we’d be able to reduce our reliance on plastic shopping bags by about a quarter?
The risks are more problematic, particularly for governments, but the price we may eventually pay for taking no risks today is unthinkable.
The ACT is uniquely placed to create a model for a sustainable city-state that can inspire the world. We are probably the only such jurisdiction in the world to have more than half of our land area designated as either national park or nature reserve.
The 2003 bushfires brought home to all of us the inescapable interdependence of our urban areas, our non-urban buffer zones, and our conservation reserves. Our recovery as a city cannot be seen in solation from our recovery as a landscape, our recovery as an ecosystem, our recovery as a society.
At the most basic level, our bush is integral to the ‘look and feel’ of our city. But the relationship goes deeper than that. The parrots that spend their summers far away in the cool mountains come down into the city during the winter months, to feast on the seasonal berries and nuts. Our wild areas are a gigantic and pristine laboratory for scientists, and a place of recreation and spiritual restoration for all of us.
So central is the urban/non-urban relationship to the identity and the sustainability of Canberra that the ACT Government has begun a journey to have the ACT declared as a UNESCO Biosphere.
UNESCO came up with the notion of biospheres in an attempt to reconcile the seeming conflicts between conserving biodiversity, promoting the legitimate economic and social goals of a community, and preserving and promoting the cultural values of a place. Many of the places so far declared as UNESCO biospheres are areas where predominantly pristine reserve comes into contact with agricultural land.
The ACT would be the only Australian biosphere to include a major urban centre. But the ACT Government feels it fits the criteria well, containing each of the necessary biosphere elements:
- a core protected area with little human activity: in this case Namadgi;
- a buffer zone: our rural lands, forests, nature parks and the Murrumbidgee corridor;
- and an economic and social zone: the city and its surrounding villages.
The bid to be declared a biosphere is in its very early stages, but the ACT Government believes this is an aim worth pursuing, a goal that will embed in the minds of every Canberran the importance of true sustainability.
Of course, not all sustainability has to have an overt environmental flavour. The ACT Government believes strongly that social sustainability can be enhanced by a government commitment to public art, for example, or by giving the community opportunities to engage in other forms of culture — as the current Government is doing through its weekday lunchtime Groovin in Garema concerts and performances.
Sustainability takes the unlikeliest forms. The building of the ACT prison is an example of sustainability that might not spring automatically to the minds of many people. Yet the project exhibits many of the characteristics that exemplify true sustainability.
The building itself will of course be built to the highest possible environmental standards, but it will also be a facility without the overt bluestone walls and razor wire most of us associate with prisons.
There will be windows and vistas — a reminder to inmates that there is a world waiting for them, if they choose to rejoin that world.
There will be a focus on giving prisoners the skills to survive on the outside.
There will be a focus on normalising the relationship between prisoners and their families.
The accommodation will range from conventional cells to shared cottage accommodation — with the lowest-security of these cottages actually located outside the wire.
These things are in the interests of inmates, but they are also in the interests of society, and in the interests of social sustainability. It is in the interests of all of us to look beyond the crime, beyond the punishment, to the life that must be lived afterwards.
I am sure that over the next two days you will hear plenty of reference made to the actions the ACT Government is taking to build a sustainable future under the Canberra Spatial Plan, the Economic White Paper and the Canberra Social Plan.
Our sustainability policy, People Place Prosperity sets out the commitments we have made, and the first ACT sustainability report – Measuring Our Progress: Canberra's Journey To Sustainability – gives a 'snapshot' of our progress to date.
I thank Manning Clark House for hosting this forum, and for fostering an important community debate about what sustainability really means for the ACT, and how we might collectively turn ideas into reality.
I also thank the Canberra Times for its continuing interest in this important subject and take pleasure in launching Sustainability for the ACT: The Future’s in Our Hands, a compilation of 29 articles that first appeared in the Canberra Times between November last year and June this year.
The series, initiated by the Sustainability Expert Reference Group, boasts articles written by some of Australia’s leading thinkers and remind us of the breadth of the term ‘sustainability’. At the time they were first published, these articles generated considerable interest and it is excellent to see them compiled here, to be given a wider and more lasting audience.
I look forward to hearing about the ideas that arise from the next two days, and wish you all a fruitful and inspiring forum.