Prime Minister Kevin Rudd: G'day folks, I'm in Brisbane today and it's been fantastic to see the level of response to my blog on climate change; we've had hundreds and hundreds of individual contributions.
What's really impressed me is the number of people who are concerned about one main thing, that is what can they do as individuals to make a difference on climate change. What can they do to bring down greenhouse gas emissions in their home, their small business and in those sorts of environments, which they directly control themselves.
One of the other big debates we are in engaged in is what do we do about energy efficiency right across the board? If you're engaged in the climate change debate, energy efficiency is often described as ‘the low-hanging fruit' - the things we can make a difference with now, rather than wait for the final impact of deals to be done in Copenhagen and elsewhere across the world.
So here are a couple of practical things that we've got on the boil. The first thing, when it comes to energy efficiency, is that we are looking at how do we help households with heating and insulation so that we bring down greenhouse gas emissions as a result. What we've done, as part of the national economic stimulus strategy for dealing with the global recession, is invest something like $4 billion into providing an opportunity for households to put in ceiling insulation. What's the objective here? To have all Australian owner-occupied dwellings with ceiling insulation over time and the equivalent which that means in terms of greenhouse gas emission reduction is bringing it down by about 50 millions tonnes equivalent, that's the first thing.
The second thing is, at a very practical level, is we're trying to make it possible for households to gain access to their own, sort of, household audit; we call it the ‘home sustainability assessment' through our Green Loans program and that enables you, on the home front, to work out what you can do additionally to help bring down greenhouse gas emissions, greater energy efficiency, et cetera.
There's a third thing and that is we have now launched the Australian Carbon Trust and in Brisbane I've just also announced Robert Hill, our former permanent representative to the United Nations, as the Chairman of this new Australian Carbon Trust, which will be based in Brisbane. But it's objective is as follows: to help individuals make their personal contribution to bringing down greenhouse gas emissions by looking at how much or how big their carbon footprint is at home and then what efficiency savings they can make on the home front and then choosing, voluntarily, to buy permits from the carbon pollution reduction scheme, which we hope to get through the senate during the course of 2009. The overall impact of that is, of course, to bring down the overall level of greenhouse gas emissions. The second thing, of course, is to help with commercial buildings to do the same. We think this is the right way to go because if you're acting as households, as small businesses, but also commercial buildings - put all those things together, it makes a big difference. And finally, on commercial buildings, within this Australian Carbon Trust we're going to have a $50 million rotating fund to help people with commercial buildings put in the best energy efficiency technologies, with the highest green-star ratings, with a grant upfront, but as they yield savings in terms of their power bills and their utilities bills, to use those savings to repay the grant and so the fund continues to be renewed and replenished overtime.
So, in summary, there are two or three measures that we are engaged in now: energy insulation for people's ceilings, number one; number two, helping families get a hold of their own household audit and how to boost their own energy efficiency through our green loans program and, three, to assist also through the Australia Carbon Trust with households, small businesses and commercial buildings and the objective overall is to make a big difference with climate change through individual action so that we're acting personally, acting locally, acting nationally and, through the Copenhagen process, also acting globally.