There is little question that the future of Canberra as a viable, liveable city depends upon us as a community and as a jurisdiction addressing key issues of sustainability.
No matter how many dams we build, or how much waste water we recycle, there is a limit to the amount of water available to our city. Knowledge and concern about climate change requires policies aimed at reducing our energy use.
We will have to reduce the amount of waste going to landfill because there are more valuable uses of scarce land and because we will increasingly recognise waste as a resource; for instance, organic waste can build soil and produce methane gas.
We know we should drive less, but our urban development favours cars over walking, cycling and public transport, and instead of taking the lead in sustainability, our planners have had to be dragged screaming and kicking to consider solar orientation, bus and light rail lanes rather than car carriage ways and we still have a long way to go.
If we don't get on with it, and if the scientists' predictions for climate change impacts on our region are even half correct, our city will be facing a declining population in future years, despite the government's target of 500,000 by 2030. A target which, by the way, has no basis for sustainability apart from an outmoded economic one.
In Canberra, we have a fundamental problem: we still lack a framework for measuring progress.
In 2004 the year of the last ACT election the ACT Government produced a set of documents called Measuring our Progress. The information collated within them should have been a wake-up call: they showed that Canberra residents have an ecological footprint equal to the world's biggest consumers and that includes energy, water and goods and services and their supply-chain impacts in production, distribution and disposal.
Just a year before, Jon Stanhope put his name to a document called People, Place, Prosperity A Policy For Sustainability In The ACT. The ACT Government understood sustainability to be about interdependence of economy, environment and society requiring a long-term perspective where responsibilities and benefits are shared equitably and ensuring that responding to the needs of today's citizens must not erode the ability of future generations to meet their needs.
The Chief Minister announced that he had already taken two key actions: the establishment of an Office of Sustainability in the Chief Minister's Department and setting up the Sustainability Expert Reference Group to advise him. The Reference Group was a casualty of the Functional Review and the disastrous budget of 2006, which made John Hargreaves Minister for the Environment and moved the Office of Sustainability to Territory and Municipal Services where it is recruiting staff again.
At least Hargreaves was willing to admit that he knew nothing about his portfolio, so Environment, Water and Climate Change now sit with the Chief Minister again.
This is the man who constantly reiterates that climate change is the biggest threat we will ever face, and who says that ''the ACT Government is committed to showing leadership on sustainability''. Despite this, five years on we have made little progress along the sustainability path. Our ecological footprints still trample our earth and atmosphere.
Sustainability has to be right across government and it has to be measurable. The annual budget should be the centrepiece of a triple bottom line approach, where social and environmental well-being are seen as crucial. And that means sustainability indicators which truly measure our progress in this regard.
In my four years in the Assembly, it is obvious that Treasury and the minister who should be driving this process one the ACT Labor Government committed to in 2003 have done very little to guide other ministers and departments.
Year after year, at estimates and other hearings, officials indicate that they don't know where to begin on triple bottom line, yet they haven't sought expert advice to help them.
Outside advice is needed because Treasury officials are focused on economic growth and see little need to consider other impacts of expenditure and savings despite the Auditor-General's recommendation to integrate sustainability reporting across government.
We should begin with a sustainability audit, assessing our natural and built environment on such matters as: access to open space; housing affordability; public transport availability and use; kilometres and safety of roads, walking and cycling trails and footpaths; greenhouse gas emissions; household, commercial and institutional energy and water use; take up of green energy options; indoor and outdoor air quality; water consumption; grey water and rainwater storage and use; condition of streams and waterways; native vegetation cover and carbon sequestration; weeds and pests; and waste generation and waste recycling levels. These make sense if accompanied by measures such as citizen engagement (a democratic audit) and measures of health and social inclusion.
The ACT could have been leading on sustainability if the government had acted when Greens first brought up the topic back in the 1990s. But we have fallen behind other progressive jurisdictions.
The Federal Government is yet to take a leadership role, although the Department of Environment and Heritage wrote a guide for state and territory governments in 2003. New Zealand is way ahead of us in this.
So where is Canberra on the road to sustainability? The trouble is, without the right indicators, we cannot know.
The ''sustainability indicators'' used in the budget are just rebadging measures for Government's core business. We have a climate change strategy but one that lacks meaningful targets to measure our progress against.
Setting up indicators to measure our response shouldn't be this difficult.
At the election we will see more promises on the environment and sustainability front but until some pressure is put on Treasury to work with other jurisdictions that have encouraged sustainability by meaningfully measuring it, and to seek expert advice, there is a good chance that we will still be talking about it at the 2012 election.
Dr Foskey is the retiring ACT Greens Member for Molonglo in the ACT Assembly.