I want to introduce 100 Climate Conversations. The series presents 100 visionary Australians that are taking positive action to respond to the most critical issue of our time, which is climate change. We are broadcasting today in the Boiler Hall of the Powerhouse museum in Sydney. Before it was home to the museum, it was the Ultimo power station. Built in 1899, it supplied coal powered electricity to Sydney’s tram system into the 1960s. If you look around the hall, unique industrial features remain, including the imposing chimneys you entered between and coal cart rail tracks that run underneath this stage.

The Powerhouse acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of the ancestral homelands on which our museums are situated. We respect their Elders past, present and future and recognise their continuous connection to Country. My name is Paddy Manning. I’m a journalist and author of a book called Body Count How Climate Change Is Killing Us. Sitting with me is ACT Minister for Energy and Emissions Reduction and Attorney General Shane Rattenbury, who I have the pleasure of speaking with today. Shane is the member for Kurrajong in the ACT’s Legislative Assembly and the leader of the ACT Greens. He was first elected in 2008, becoming the first House Speaker from a Green party in any parliament in the world. Shane, Greens are normally stereotyped as inner-city elites, but your own background is nothing of the sort. Can you tell us a bit about your upbringing and how it shaped you and when and how you discovered a passion for the environment?

Sure. I was very lucky to grow up in coastal New South Wales in a town called Batemans Bay. It was an idyllic childhood, you know, free to roam. Spending summers at the beach, all of those kind of things. It was a great childhood in a small community where a lot of people knew each other. But I won a scholarship to go to school and we moved up to Canberra and that sort of I guess set my life on a trajectory. But the environmentalism really came as a teenager. I was a child of the 80s, I describe it as, and the big issues were being debated at that time. Forest protection, the Franklin Dam, the hole in the ozone layer, the Nuclear Disarmament party was around talking about nuclear weapons. These big environmental issues were going on in, I think, your very formative years as a teenager where you’re starting to think about current affairs, global politics. And so for me, that really piqued an interest in environmental issues and I guess what has become a lifelong passion.

You won a scholarship to Canberra Grammar, one of the most privileged schools in the city and in the country, you then go into ANU to study economics and law, majoring in environmental law and a career in the public service. What made you decide to join the radical activists at Greenpeace?

Look, there was that commitment to environmental issues, and for me, Greenpeace had been a real inspiration as a teenager. Watching them in the Antarctic, getting protection for Antarctica, taking on the whaling fleets. Those sort of things have been very inspiring to me and I was fortunate. I left university, got myself a job working in the public service, which was terrific. But then a job came along, advertised for Greenpeace and I thought, well, this would be a great chance to get involved. It was actually working as a political lobbyist for Greenpeace, so walking the halls of power in Canberra and not the sort of traditional image of Greenpeace. But I got, I got the job and there I was at 25 and 26 with what I thought was the dream job. I thought this was the peak of my career. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do afterwards, but I just couldn’t believe my luck that I was actually in that place and had an opportunity to spend every day of my working life working on environmental issues.

Then it took you overseas, as I understand, the Greenpeace job, and you actually had some pretty hair-raising encounters at sea. It wasn’t all the corridors of power, was it? You know, confronting whalers as the Head of Global Oceans. Did you ever feel your life was on the line?

Yeah, look, I was fortunate, Greenpeace being an international organization, I did get a chance to work overseas. I actually went to work first in Bangkok, helping develop Greenpeace in South-East Asia. I then went on to work in Amsterdam as the head of the oceans campaign, as you said, and in 2005, Japan announced they were going to significantly increase their whaling quota. For a long time, whaling had pretty much come to an end and Japan had been taking some whales under their so-called scientific program, but they announced a significant expansion, including targetting what at that point were still listed as endangered species, humpback whales and fin whales. And so we took a decision. We would send Greenpeace ships to Antarctica for the first time in a long time to confront the whaling fleet.

We sent two ships, a crew of 60. The hardest part, of course, is finding the whaling fleet. We set off from Cape Town, sailed all the way to Antarctica, it takes several weeks. It turns out I get terribly seasick. I spent the first week just frankly being very ill, but eventually we found the whaling fleet and we spent quite a lot of time just confronting them at sea. And it was hair raising in a sense that you’re in an environment in which the air temperature is zero or one degrees, even in the middle of summer. The water temperature is similar. If you fall into the water, depending on whether you’ve got a survival suit on or not, you don’t have very long until you perish simply from hypothermia. And of course, you’ve got this high-speed environment where you’ve got a whaling ship chasing whales, you’ve got ice in the water and we’re trying to put ourselves between the whale and the harpoon. It is certainly an adrenaline raising moment.

I understand you were based in Amsterdam also for a time with Greenpeace and attended some of the earlier climate negotiations held by the UN. You’ve been working then on climate issues for a very long time. What perspective does that give you and do you suffer climate fatigue sometimes?

There are moments, but I think that we’ve reached a point – we’re very close to a tipping point when it comes to climate, in my view. We’ve had a lot of people who’ve worked for decades now to bring this to the fore. And I’ve been working on it for more than, well, nearly 25 years at least. I think during those times it did feel – it felt uncertain whether we’d ever hit that point of mainstream action, mainstream interest and a concerted attempt to turn things around. Tipping points are best defined in hindsight, I think. It’s hard to know when you’re in the moment. And along the way I’ve felt various tipping points and we’ve seen them in the renewable energy sector, for example.

We’ve crossed that threshold now where renewable energy is now the cheapest new form of electricity. If you want to build a new power source today, the cheapest version you can do is renewables. You wouldn’t build a coal-fired or nuclear power station because they’re more expensive. It doesn’t make sense. That’s one tipping point we’ve crossed. In terms of overall action, we’re getting close because I think the community understands climate change now in really significant and personal ways in Australia. The experience of Black Summer, the experience of the recent Lismore floods. These are moments where, for people who’ve got otherwise busy lives, who are not working on climate all the time, suddenly they understand the enormity of it. The direct personal impact in ways that they don’t normally have to think about.

With that activist background and your economics and law degrees behind you, what made you decide to go into politics? And was it always going to be the Greens?

It certainly was always going to be for the Greens. I remember in 1992 I was at university. The Green party was just launched nationally by Bob Brown, sort of coming out of Tasmania and various other groups around the country coming together. And I suddenly thought, that’s a political philosophy that speaks to, makes sense to me. And I immediately got involved and I’ve been involved ever since. So it’s been a long journey there as well. But for me, politics is not that different to activism. You have different levers to pull, particularly once you become a minister, which was not what I expected at the beginning. You just want to get in there and raise the issues. But as an activist, as a campaigner at Greenpeace, your job is to get out there and tell a story, present the evidence, and try and encourage a different way of doing things. And frankly, that’s what I do in politics as well. I’m in there trying to convince both the voting public, but the other members of parliament that we need to do things differently to the way we’ve done it if we’re going to tackle, you know, and obviously from the Greens, our major focus is to tackle environmental issues.

Before we go even further, could you please – and talk about the ACT’s energy and climate policies – could you please explain the Territory’s electoral system and how it’s different to most states? In particular, how multi-member electorates make it easier for minor parties to gain representation.

Sure, the ACT got self-government in 1989, prior to that it was just a function of the commonwealth government who ran Canberra. But we moved to self-government and we have these multi-member electorates. It’s actually the same system as Tasmania, which interestingly has been another strong place for the Greens. We have what’s called a Hare-Clark electoral system. There are five electorates each now with five members and what that means is to get elected you need a quota of only one sixth of the overall vote. So 16 per cent essentially. And what it means is that independents and smaller parties can break through the traditional two-party duopoly in Australia and get a foothold.

The ACT, I think, is an interesting electoral context. It has rarely had a majority government. The city has tended to return independents, minor parties, the Democrats for example, in the 90s had seats. And so we’ve seen a long history of that in the ACT and what that’s produced is what is a more European style of politics where you do have multi-party governments, people stitching arrangements together to make it work. And I think that – from a political point of view – does create a more dynamic political environment. You’ve not just got one party who can run the agenda they want to run. We don’t have an upper house in the ACT either. It’s a single unicameral parliament, just a single house. And so having that multi-member system does create some of the dynamism that you might get out of an upper house, say, in some of the states.

Can you explain how did the ACT come to set the ambitious goal of achieving 100 per cent renewable energy by 2020?

It actually stems back to 2008. That was the year I was first elected. The Greens had a terrific election and we went from having just one seat to four. It thrust us into the balance of power. We had four seats out of what was then a 17 member parliament and we sat down with both the Labor and Liberal party, having found ourselves in that balance of power position, to talk about what our common agenda would be for the next four years. And as the Greens, one of the key things we put on the table was wanting a legislated greenhouse gas reduction target. I’d just come from working for Greenpeace. Literally, I’d been at the Bali climate talks in November 2007 where the key discussion was industrialised countries had to be reducing their emissions by 25 to 40 per cent by 2020. And so for me as a policy position, I brought that to local politics, saying, Well, that’s what we need to do globally and as a wealthy country, that’s what Australia should be doing. And at subnational level that’s what we should be doing. And so we Greens insisted as part of our negotiations that a legislated target should be on the table. We couldn’t agree on a number at that point, but over the next 12 months we had a parliamentary enquiry determined that we’d go for 40 per cent by 2020 and we wrote it into legislation and so suddenly we had to find ways to meet that target. And I think that’s really interesting in the Australian context, where at a national level there’s been a real reluctance to put climate targets in place.

I fundamentally believe that they are central to making progress because once that target’s there, the public service starts to gear up, business starts to say, Well, hang on, the government is serious about this. We better start thinking about what does that future look like? because it is going to happen. And so the 100 per cent renewable electricity came from that. For the ACT at that time, the largest proportion of our emissions came from electricity generation. So that was the biggest, the obvious, and at that time easier place to start to think about how to reduce emissions.

You were Climate Change Minister for four years from 2016 to 2020 and you continue to hold the portfolios of energy and emissions reduction. You achieve the target ahead of schedule. Why could the ACT to do that when no other state or territory bar Tasmania, which is hydro dependent, has been able to do it?

I think the first thing is just to explain briefly the technical side of it. It is a net target in the sense that we don’t generate all of that 100 per cent of the electricity in the ACT. We sit in the national grid. But what we actually undertook was a series of large what are called reverse auctions, where we essentially went out to the industry and said, We want to buy this much renewable electricity and who will bid for it? And they bid in. And so essentially we have now purchased the equivalent of the ACT’s annual energy usage. It was a really important initiative at the time because a lot of this bidding was going on in 2013, 2014, when Tony Abbott was in power and had actually started to undermine the national renewable electricity target.

So for the renewables sector, nothing was going on. The federal government was stymieing the growth of renewables in Australia and the ACT going out to market with literally hundreds of megawatts at a time of demand helped keep, particularly that time, the wind industry, which was quite immature at that point, still going well but relatively immature. It created a stable market for those developers to continue driving forward with projects. So we got good prices, the best prices seen in Australia at that point in time. But as the smallest jurisdiction of the country, we played a really disproportionate role in keeping the renewable sector alive in Australia.

Yes. So, Tony Abbott, the Abbott government had abolished the carbon price. You didn’t introduce a carbon tax in the Territory to make this happen?

No.

It was simply by buying the power. What was the cost impact for residents in the ACT?

That was a really important consideration and we mapped that out right at the start. And interestingly, eight or ten years down the track, we’re right on that point essentially. We anticipated at the time, that it would at maximum cost the average city household $5.65 a week to move to 100 per cent renewable electricity. And that’s about where we’re sitting at the moment.

On top of their existing bills?

Indeed. Now, at the time –

Electricity bills did go up?

They did they went up in that ballpark of $250 to $300 a year. Despite that, we continue to have amongst the cheapest electricity supplies in Australia. We are equivalent to other states and territories, so we’re not wildly above anybody else by any stretch of the imagination. And we of course put in place complementary policies because we have to be mindful that $250 to $300 a year is material for low-income households, particularly. There’s plenty of households in Canberra for which they’re wealthy enough that that doesn’t actually really matter and they’re willing to pay. We’ve got a community that is committed to climate action. But putting in place other programs, energy efficiency programs, that actually reduce household energy bills by the same, if not more than what the renewables cost the city to put in place, means that we can actually mitigate against and we can deliver climate action.

We can do it in an economically responsible way and we can protect the most vulnerable households. People often talk about, Well, you can’t put a cost burden, particularly on low-income households, to deal with climate change. What they don’t talk about in that conversation is that it’s also the lowest income households who feel the burden of climate change most strongly. And I think there’s a really important role for government there to intervene to address the market failures, but also make sure that in the transition to a zero-emission future, we particularly look after the lowest and most vulnerable households.

You came up with a climate change strategy, which we’ll come to in 2019, but it talks about a just transition for the ACT and it talks about the social cost of carbon. What is that?

Well, certainly the idea of a just transition is that to get to a net zero or a zero emissions future, we have to change. Some industries will become defunct. Some jobs that exist now won’t exist in the future. There are costs in – need to insulate houses, move to electric transport, all of these things. There are a whole range of things we need to do to make that transition. The nature of climate change is it impacts in almost every facet of our lives. The notion of a just transition is making sure that people don’t get left behind in that. Now, obviously, at a national level, the big discussion is what’s going to happen to people who work in the coal mining industry?

At an ACT level, we don’t have a mining industry, but we do have people whose jobs are dependent on fossil fuels. So, our example would be we want to electrify our bus fleet. At the moment, we have a whole bunch of people who work as diesel mechanics on our buses, and so we’ve got a job to make sure that we transition them to be able to work on electric vehicles or some other skill that they can take their current training and turn it towards. That is a small, localised example, but it’s what local governments, what you need to do where the rubber hits the road, if you like, in transitioning to that clean energy future. They’re the really practical things we need to work on.

And of course Canberra has a unique history. It’s the best planned city in Australia probably, but in some ways, has that been a help or a hindrance? Has that given you a head start or – I think of Canberra as quite car dependent and one of your strategies is to have a compact and efficient city. You’ve got a long way to go, haven’t you? Because you’ve got all those circles that you’ve got to drive around in Canberra that are going to make that problematic.

Yeah, look, Canberra is a really spread out city. A large phase of the city’s development was really accelerated. Prime Minister Menzies in the 60s said, ‘Right, we’re going to really grow Canberra.’ And that was at a time when the sort of the car dependent city, the suburban block, freeways, it was the urban design of the time. And so Canberra is immensely spread out. We have extremely low population density compared to many cities globally and the distances between where people work and where they live are significant. And so we do have a high rate of car driving.

We’re also now at a point having moved to a 100 per cent renewable electricity where more than 60 per cent of our greenhouse gas emissions come from transport. And again, we’re not a heavy industry city, so most of that is just us Canberrans driving around doing the things we do in life, going to work, taking the kids to school, going to sport, all the things that people do. And so transport is a really big focus for us now, but the historical planning of the city does mitigate against us. The distances are not readily compatible with bike riding unless you’re super fit. We don’t have a strong public transport system because of the low density of the city. And so we’ve got to – that is where the discussion is now going to. Saying, Well, how do we build a more compact city? Still a really liveable city, but trying to look at some of the better facets of European cities, some of those lifestyle issues that enable us to have a climate friendly city that’s still a great city to live in.

You achieved the 100 per cent renewable, but by 2020 did you think about, well, why not go for a 200 per cent like someone like Mike Cannon-Brookes is arguing for Australia to do?

Australia should definitely be going well beyond 100 per cent. We are an energy powerhouse in a way that is going to be so important in the future, whether that’s electricity, hydrogen production. Australia has got so much natural resource when it comes to renewable energy. I don’t think the ACT is the place for that. We don’t have the land mass, we don’t have the wind resource. Our best wind resource is up on the top of the ranges, which is a national park, so we’re not going to install wind turbines up. There is great wind resource in the region just beyond our borders, Crookwell, Goulburn, some of those places. But the ACT itself is not going to be a producer.

We see our role more as a research hub, as a test bed of technologies. We’re a great place for testing things out, we’re big enough that it’s a worthwhile scale to test things. But we’re small enough that you can – and we’ve got a community that’s willing to embrace new things – that we can be an excellent testbed. We also just have the one level of government. It’s a state and local government rolled into one and so you don’t even have that tension you sometimes have, say, in New South Wales between state and local government not necessarily be on the same page.

You were for a long time, a member of the inter-governmental Energy Ministers council working alongside other states and the Federal Energy Minister, Angus Taylor. What was that experience like being the only Green round the table and was the ACT able to make a contribution at that national level?

Yeah, certainly. I’ve been on that council. I still am on that council – although it’s not functioning terribly well at the moment. That’s a different story. But look, being a Green in those environments is still very rare. There’s been very few Greens ministers in any governments in Australia and to go to those national meetings, you know, Labor and Liberal see that as their domain. So socially, it’s not an easy environment but I’m not there to be social, I’m there to get a job done. It’s really important that jurisdictions like the ACT have a seat at those national tables and certainly like when the National Energy Guarantee was being talked about through that era, we were probably leading the charge in raising concerns with the design of that scheme. It ultimately didn’t land because Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull was removed before we completed the negotiations. But being able to be a voice at that table was very important.

But surely the demonstrated achievements of the ACT, they must register with the other jurisdictions. And so you have seen South Australia for example, in the wake of their blackout in 2016, get proactive on the energy independence and on a switch to renewables. I mean, do you think you are seeing New South Wales move now with former Energy Minister Matt Kean? Tasmania, obviously already, Victoria are taking action. I mean, do you think that you have been able to kind of provide some national leadership effectively?

Well, I think what we have seen is a dearth of leadership at a national level. It’s gone from reluctance to at times straight out denialism when it comes to making this energy transition. Particularly in recent years, the federal government has been, frankly, a disaster for this country when it comes to energy policy. We’ve seen them driving for more gas, the opening of coal mines. And in Angus Taylor, someone who has been a recognised sceptic around particularly wind power and so there’s been a real vacuum at that national level. The thing that gives me real optimism in Australia is that as you’ve touched on, a lot of the states are doing terrific things. And you know, Matt Kean in New South Wales I think has been very important as a Liberal politician in speaking up on these issues and making the point that climate change has got to be above politics. And I think he deserves a lot of credit for that. He has driven a significant policy change and helped reshape how conservative parties think about climate and energy policy.

Similarly in South Australia, I think it was a credit to the South Australian government when Labor lost power and the Liberal party came in, they didn’t dismantle what South Australia was doing. They had some different views on how it should be executed but they essentially stayed on the same path. Those things have been really important. If and when we get a change of federal government and we get a federal government who actually want to embrace climate action, I think Australia can move very quickly because we’ve got excellent building blocks at a state level and a lot of local councils as well have been doing really innovative things. And so there’s this hive of activity going on that when we actually bring it together into a national plan to get on and do things, I think Australia can very quickly go from being a laggard to actually being one of the leading countries on the planet.

Okay, the 2020 renewables target is behind you, but the ACT government has continued to set ambitious goals. Most importantly, perhaps you’ve set a goal of achieving net zero emissions by 2045. Is that in line with the climate science in terms of a wealthy, greenhouse intensive nation like Australia accepting a fair share of our responsibility for limiting warming to one and a half degrees?

Yeah look, we have got a series of targets. We’ve brought our zero targets through to 2045 as you mentioned. We’ve actually put in place a series of interim targets that are also in legislation. And I think that’s very important because to set a target out of 2045, I don’t think I’ll still be in politics in 2045. I won’t be held to account for it, but I have to take action today and having interim targets, we’ve got them in 2025, 2030 and 2040, holds governments of the day to account. It holds the whole community to account. It invites us to stop and go, ‘Are we on the trajectory we need to be, or do we need to redouble our efforts?’

Now those targets were put together for us by our independent climate council, people like Will Steffen, Barbara Norman, who are in this series, where on our climate council in the ACT and they looked at the carbon budget both globally and what role particularly wealthy countries, as you touched on, should be playing in that. And they said to us, ‘Well, these are the sort of benchmarks we should be achieving.’ They’re very ambitious. They don’t basically leave it till we get to 2040 and try and do it in the last few years. We’re on 40 per cent now. Our next target is a 50 to 60 per cent reduction by 2025 and they ratchet up from there. So I think we are actually playing the role we should be as wealthy communities, as advanced economies. Our job is to work this technology out and then help emerging economies actually adopt that. Skip over some of the dirty steps we did along the way and go straight to a cleaner future.

Well, 2025, for those of us who can count, is only three years away. So how are you tracking? You’ve got a target of 50 to 60 per cent reductions based on 1990 levels by 2025. Where do you think you’re going to come in?

We actually came in ahead of schedule on our 2020 targets. In 2020 we were meant to get to a 40 per cent reduction. We actually got to 45 per cent. We think some of that was COVID related because it was measured at around the time where we’d seen, the way the accounting works, we had a couple of lockdowns by that point and I think that put a real dent in our transport emissions. So we think we’re about in the right place compared to our 2020 target. The 2025 target is our hardest one because the technology is not quite there. If you think about the low penetration we’ve seen of electric vehicles in Australia, for example, and that is our next big area that is going to be the hardest one. Our sense is that by the time we get to the 2030 target, the technology will be catching up in a way that will accelerate the transition. So I think this is the most difficult one for us. It’s the one I’m most nervous about.

It’s not in the bank.

It’s definitely not in the bank. We’ve got to keep striving. We’ve got a lot of work to do to get there and we are putting a range of programs in place. We’ve got a whole bunch going on at the moment that will get us there, but we’re uncertain. I think it’s important to be upfront about that, be upfront with our community because the really interesting part of what we’ve done so far is moving 100 per cent renewable electricity, the government just did it. Now the community was supportive, but they didn’t need to change their day to day lives. We just organised it in the back end, the power started flowing. They still flick on their light switch, turn on the TV. It’s all the same as it’s always been.

You know, there is a cost involved and we’re very upfront about that. The action we have to take now; transport is more than 60 per cent of our emissions, so we need to get people to purchase zero emission vehicles. We need to invite them to walk and cycle more, take public transport, all those kind of things. Those are lifestyle changes. 20 per cent of our emissions now comes from natural gas use or fossil fuel gas use. For a long time in the ACT, we were told that fossil gas or natural gas as it was marketed as, was the cheap and clean alternative. And so we’ve got a city that uses gas a lot for heating and cooking particularly, but also in commercial applications. And so to transition out of gas, the community also needs to change how their home is set up and how they go about things. I guess in saying all of that, we’ve gone from a phase where the government could just do it, to we now have to engage the community deeply in the climate transition in a way that they haven’t so far. And so a lot of the change we have to make now is much harder to bring about than perhaps the electricity policy was.

Okay, then you’ve got the challenge of 65 to 75 per cent by 2030. How are you going to get there? I mean, is that is that a step change?

It is a step change. It’s a big one and I think it is going to be two things. It’s electrifying our transport and it’s getting off gas. Interestingly, we’re already seeing quite a few of the community making their own choice to get off gas. We’ve got a community that wants to embrace climate action. People are making it both as a[n] environmental decision and as an economic decision because having a gas connection costs. So people are looking at it going, Well, actually, if I electrify, I can get rid of my gas bill and just have one bill. And so people are doing it for that reason.

As a government, we are starting to talk to people about the need to get off gas because it’s going to take us a while. But the sooner we send that signal, the sooner people start to do it. In terms of transport, electrifying transport, we’ve got twice the rate of EV ownership compared to the rest of the country at this point in time. So we’re getting there, but we’ve got a long way to go and I’m just working on a new electric vehicle strategy at the moment. We adopted one a few years ago. We took government leadership there because I think government can send really strong signals.

We’ve been electrifying our own transport fleet. That also creates a supply of second hand vehicles for the community to take up, so that government leadership is so important. And again, it brings us back to that we’ve that vacuum we’ve seen at national level. Government can really both do practical things and send powerful signals. And that’s the role we try to play is by getting in and doing it ourselves first, learning the lessons, showing what can be done. We think we inspire community action and hope as well.

Alright then you’ve got to get 90 per cent by 2040 and net zero about 2045. So, what are the last, hardest emissions to cut and can you tell us how net zero will actually work? Will you allow offsets, do you factor in some X amount of reductions that you’re going to get from draw down or so-called negative emissions technologies?

Yeah, I think they’re really interesting questions, there will be hard areas. Industrial applications of fossil fuels, niche applications. Most of the things we need to do now, we have the technology to make the transition, but there will be hard ones at the end. But that comes back to that notion of a carbon budget. If we do a lot now for those really hard things at the end, we’ll have some latitude, we’ll have a bit of time to work on it. So I think that again speaks to that early action of getting stuck in and getting on with it.

I spoke earlier of that notion of a tipping point. I know a lot of those things are out there, the technology is available. It’s simply about us being willing to embrace it. And again, for me, that’s the role of government, rather than being out there talking about fear, talking about economic costs, talking about job loss. Our job is to be out there saying to the community, actually, our scientists are giving us really clear advice that our quality of life, human survival, the survival of other species, depends on us as humans walking lightly on this planet. We have a job to do that and we actually have the technologies available and we should be embracing the future, not fearing it.

You mentioned the Black Summer earlier. Canberra had a terrible experience in terms of smoke and air quality through that bushfire season. You obviously had the terrible bushfires of 2003. Is the ACT exposed to the risks of climate change? Another part of your strategy is building resilience. It’s not all about getting emissions down, is it?

No, we are absolutely exposed to climate impacts. There’s some fascinating statistics about the ACT. Between 1913 and 2006, we only recorded nine days above 40 degrees Celsius. We’ve had more than 20 days above 40 degrees Celsius in the intervening 16 years, including having our hottest ever day at 44 degrees, we broke the records of having four days in a row above 40 degrees. This is our city’s future. They’re the scenarios that we’re told are coming along.

The smoke was an extraordinarily personal impact for the citizens of our city. They felt that we had the worst air quality in the world, that quite a few days in a row, the city was literally blanketed in smoke. Visibility was down under 100 metres. It’s something that it felt like Armageddon, and it had a deeply personal impact on people in our city. As well as, of course, the fires which took out most of the Namadgi National Park, which is where our water supply comes from. You could sit at home and see the fires burning at night across the hills. These are the sort of very personal experiences, I think, that activate people’s understanding of climate change.

It’s terrible that it comes to having those experiences, but it makes it very clear to people what the likely impacts are down to really practical things. During some of our heatwaves, we’ve had tarmac melting in car parks, so you suddenly as a local government, you’ve got these really practical and concrete impacts. Our gas-powered buses don’t operate above 40 degrees, it turns out. We lost a whole portion of our bus fleet, couldn’t operate in those conditions. And so I think people often think of climate change as something out there, very removed, something that’s coming in the future. But the reality is it’s very local, it’s very real, and it’s coming up much faster than many people expected.

What have been the economic impacts of your kind of ambitious climate strategy? Has it had a measurable effect on growth, for example? I mean, I saw the most recent CommSec State of the States report has you sitting at about third in terms of national economic performance. You’ve been above average I think for a while. Has there been an economic impact of your climate policy?

There is some real opportunity in this. Go back to the move to 100 per cent renewable electricity. We ran this series of large-scale reverse auctions to procure the power. As part of that, we put in place economic development component requirements on the proponents to develop industry in the ACT, and it’s funded a whole lot of research and development. We’ve got renewable energy companies with a headquarters in the ACT. The economic measures are that we’ve generated around $500 million of economic activity out of those reverse auctions, and it’s created all sorts of research and job opportunities in our city.

Talking to some of the folks that are working in that space, we’ve got young engineers that are coming to work in the renewable sector in Canberra now, and they’re saying to us, We can now come here and not just get one job with one company, but there’s enough going on as a centre of excellence for renewable energy that I can build a career here, I can move around, I can have more than one job. You know, we’ve got groundbreaking battery research happening at the Australian National University. We’ve got these wind companies with their southern hemisphere headquarters just in the city, just around the corner from where the parliament is. So there’s all of that going on that provides new opportunities and economic advantage for us.

Talking about the climate emergency, sometimes I feel like one of those communists who says communism has never been tried. I would argue aggressive climate action hasn’t been tried in Australia, except it sort of has in the ACT now, hasn’t it? You’re underway.

Yeah. We formally declared a climate emergency a few years ago. It’s an initiative that came out of Darebin City Council in Melbourne and they spread it around and we were the first state or territory-level government to adopt it. I think something like that, some people will say, look, it’s just symbolism. What does it mean? But it is about shaping the culture, shaping the understanding of the scale and the speed of what we need to do. And so I think we are doing our part when it comes to a climate emergency, I’m never satisfied, there’s more to do. The faster we can go, the better. And as wealthy advanced economies, we have a particular moral responsibility to move further and move faster and to share those lessons with others. And so we have to we have to do that.

How do you see the act in 2045? Living there, do you think things will be better or worse despite expected climate change? As a local, what will be the benefits of living in a net zero economy and society in 2045?

Look, if we’ve done things right from an adaptation point of view, despite the increasing heat, I think we will still have a very good life. It will be a hotter, drier place, will be more prone to bushfires. We will see intense storm events and the like. But if we’re smart about how we adapt our city, we’ll cope with that. Yeah, there will be difficult moments, but I think we’ll also have a potentially still a very prosperous city. If we are a city that’s embraced the future, created those job opportunities, built our city in a way that’s human friendly, because I don’t think we build our cities anywhere in Australia, particularly human friendly at the moment. We’ve got a lot to do there. We can make – we can still be a great place to live.

We’ll be under water pressure if population continues to grow, they’re the sort of things we will need to be taking into account. So I vacillate as a climate activist, as a leader in the community, you know, between having great hope because we are at those tipping points of understanding of action. But I do fear some of the consequences and the fact that young people these days will have a different future to the one myself and people of our sort of generations have grown up with. But I do believe we can give them a good future.

Obviously, we are in the middle of a federal election campaign. Neither major party is talking about climate ambition of anything like the level that you’ve shown in the ACT. Can you tell us, first of all, what do you expect out of this federal election, particularly in the ACT?

I think the modern wisdom is don’t try and predict elections. We’ve seen extraordinary results in the last few years, not just both in Australia but globally. You know, no one ever thought President Trump would make it. The pollsters certainly didn’t think so. I think we do see an increased unpredictability or volatility in the way people are voting. I think people are frustrated with politics and so you’re seeing they’re looking at different options.

A week or so out from the federal election I’m loathe to predict, it’s going to be a fascinating Saturday night sitting, watching the results come through. The rise of the teal independents, whether that is, I guess comes to fruition and we see some of them elected. It has been disappointing to see the lack of ambition when it comes to climate action through the federal election. Of course, we’ve got a federal coalition who have got their own set of problems. We’ve seen Matt Canavan suggesting that the net zero target is dead. I mean, that’s an extraordinary thing to be saying at this point in time. I’m not surprised from Senator Canavan. That’s his view of the world. He’s wrong about that. The Labor party, they’re so desperate to win they’ve gone for a small, small target strategy in the election and so we’ve seen a lack of ambition. I do hope that if they’re successful in winning, they’ll build that ambition.

Certainly, as the Greens, we’ve been very clear that if we find ourselves in a balance of power arrangement at the federal level, we will seek to replicate what we’ve done in the ACT and push the Labor party to be a better version of themselves to embrace the necessity of climate action. I’ve certainly been talking to Adam Bandt very clearly about the model we’ve had in the ACT and the way that can work very successfully and our two parties can work together and I think produce good outcomes.

Climate action clearly is a marathon rather than a sprint. You just happen to be a marathon runner. Does that inform you, you know, after 25 years working on these issues, do you feel like it’s a marathon.

Yeah I’ve kept up my running while I’ve been in politics. It’s actually really important from a personal wellbeing point of view, it can be pretty tough. Politics generally, I think, is hard work. But when you’re in a smaller party, when you’re pushing difficult issues, it can feel like a really uphill battle sometimes. And running is great for the mental health. For me, it’s great quality time to get out and just have some quiet time. I usually run by myself. I’m very fortunate in Canberra. We’ve got some beautiful places to run. My morning run is around places like Mount Ainslie or Lake Burley Griffin. Up on Mount Ainslie I’ll see kangaroos, black cockatoos gang-gang cockatoos, wildflowers at the right time of year. It’s pretty enriching for the soul and it reminds me of why I do what I do. And it’s inspiring to sort of get out there and think This is why we’re fighting for these beautiful, natural places, for this fabulous planet we live on.

Could I thank you, minister, and please, if you would join me in a round of applause. To follow the program online you can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And visit the 100 Climate Conversations exhibition or join us for a live recording, go to 100climateconversations.com.

This is a significant new project for the museum and the records of these conversations will form a new climate change archive preserved for future generations in the Powerhouse collection of over 500,000 objects that tell the stories of our time. It is particularly important to First Nations peoples to preserve conversations like this, building on the oral histories and traditions of passing down our knowledges, sciences and innovations which we know allowed our Countries to thrive for tens of thousands of years.