Gabrielle Reilly: What are your preferred energy sources for both household electricity and vehicles?
Mike Rann: I've been encouraging people to embrace either purchasing green power or installing solar panels on their homes. We passed a feed-in law that provides a real incentive for people to go solar by paying them double for the renewable power they feed into the grid. As a Government, we're also committed to reducing our carbon footprint by buying 50 per cent of our energy from certified green power sources by 2014, and then going even further, by offsetting all of our emissions by 2020 by purchasing green power and other carbon offsets. Our Cabinet is already offsetting all of it's carbon emissions. We've funded solar panel installations on the State Parliament, Museum, Art Gallery, Airport and the country's largest roof-top solar installation at our Royal Showgrounds. We have joined the Federal Labor Government in investing in a new a new model green car to be produced at the General Motors Holden plant here in Adelaide. When I came to office, South Australia didn't have a single working wind turbine. With just eight per cent of the population, we now have 58 per cent of Australia's wind power.
Gabrielle Reilly: What has been the response to the historic plastic bag ban and what results do you hope to achieve?
Mike Rann: We've had a great response, in fact our polling shows that more than 70 per cent of South Australians strongly support the ban on non-reusable plastic bags, the kind that you see in Supermarkets. Before the ban was introduced, every year in South Australia, 400 million plastic bags were dumped into the environment, into our waste stream, into our waterways. So this will prevent that. What I'd like to see is this ban to go national because four billion plastic bags are dumped into our nation's environment each year.
Gabrielle Reilly: As a student you protested the French nuclear testing in the Pacific and your history shows a great involvement with environmental issues. Could you elaborate on your personal evolution towards uranium mining and the evolution of nuclear energy?
Mike Rann: Yeah, I was heavily involved in the campaign in New Zealand to stop the atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons by the French in the Pacific. Our New Zealand peace groups sent boats to Mururoa Atol to sit in the testing zone to defy the French to explode their bomb. It was a David and Goliath battle. Eventually, when our protesters on the yacht were imprisoned, it turned worldwide public opinion to our cause. Eventually, the French were forced to abandon atmospheric testing and go underground, and then eventually stop testing in the Pacific.
I've been involved in range of environmental causes over the years. I was Australia's and probably the world's first Minister for Climate Change and I'm strongly committed to renewable energy. In a state with no hydro-electricity, we will have about 20 per cent of our power coming from renewables by 2012, and much higher by 2020.
We have about 40 per cent of the world's known uranium deposits, but we do not have nuclear power stations operating in Australia. Internationally, what I've been opposed to is the non-peaceful use of nuclear power. I don't see that as being inconsistent. In fact a number of countries in Asia, the Americas and Europe are embracing nuclear power as well as renewables in order to reduce the massive carbon emissions of the coal industry.
