Melissa Parke (Fremantle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

On 4 September it was my great pleasure to accompany the Prime Minister on her visit to South Fremantle Senior High School for a special event to celebrate the school's incredible achievement of becoming the first carbon neutral school in Australia under Low Carbon Australia's certification process.

To give people a sense of the magnitude of this achievement: there are only 28 organisations in all of Australia that are accredited as carbon neutral, and South Fremantle is the first school. As Low Carbon Australia's chairman, Mike Rann, noted:

South Fremantle Senior High School joins 27 other leading Australian organisations including Qantas, Virgin, NAB, ANZ, CBRE and Australian Paper, who through the Carbon Neutral Program are now collectively avoiding more than 1 million tonnes of carbon emissions annually.

The first thing anyone hearing that list of organisations would recognise is the huge relative discrepancy in terms of financial resources that exists between national banks and airlines, on the one hand, and a government high school on the other. What South Fremantle has done represents a nation-leading achievement of which every student, teacher and member of the school community should be immensely proud.

The school's hard but inspirational work involved making a 15 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, including 57.6 tonnes of CO2 emissions saved through greenhouse audit measures, and the planting of 29,000 trees through the Seed to Tree project. The school installed energy efficient heaters, flow restrictors on all hot water taps and a real-time monitoring system to track the use of electricity, gas and water.

Recognition for this outcome must go to the school principal, Geri Hardy; to Kathy Anketell, the school's sustainability officer—who since 2007 has led the entire school community with great intelligence, creativity and perseverance through a remarkable series of changes, programs and projects on the way to achieving carbon neutrality—as well as the teachers and students who supported that vision; and, finally, to Jan Newman and Professor Peter Newman. Peter Newman's multiple roles as a school parent and as a member of both the IPCC panel and the board of Infrastructure Australia make it no surprise that he, together with his wife, Jan, was responsible for the idea in the first place. He was also involved in guiding the process along the way, and in helping to arrange for two of his PhD students at the Curtin University Sustainability Policy Institute to undertake the work necessary to meet the requirements for Low Carbon Australia certification.

I referred in my first speech in this place to South Fremantle's vision to have the first carbon neutral school in Australia, and it is thrilling to see that dream become a reality. At the celebratory event attended by the Prime Minister, Peter Newman said that people should never doubt the capacity of a local community to initiate significant change. That puts us in mind of the wise reflection by Margaret Mead, who said: 'Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.' In this case, what started with a small group of Fremantle sustainability enthusiasts soon spread and caught fire within the hearts and minds of an entire school community. Indeed, with this remarkable result South Fremantle Senior High School has shone a light along the road of what is possible.