The modest ACT budget includes a $6.5 million package focusing on climate change issues.
The funding includes (but is not limited to): $2 million in grants for low-income households to assist with the uptake of solar energy; $200,000 to deliver actions contained in the ACT's Climate Change Strategy; $625,000 for the continuation of "Actsmart" programmes to encourage businesses to shift towards sustainable energy options; $3.5 million to extend the Energy Efficiency Improvement Scheme to assist households to become more sustainable; and $150,000 for research to identify best practice to overcome barriers and inform policies promoting the uptake of electric vehicles.
The contrast with New Zealand is stark. Lines company Unison in Hawke's Bay is free to discourage solar energy via its potty "solar tax", while the ACT budget offers grants to accelerate the spread of the same technology.
Our Transport Minister, Simon Bridges, admits that carbon emissions don't come into transport planning, while the ACT Government is looking for ways of promoting electric vehicles.
Minister Bridges' confession is all the more worrying when you consider that he's also Energy and Associate Climate Change Minister.
Despite the supposed influence of an environment-focused faction within the National Party known as the "blue-greens", the Key Government doesn't rate environmental or climate-change issues as important.
This is hard to understand as many places endure yet another "hottest year since records started" and we watch posh bits of Sydney drop into the surf.
If this blase attitude is wrongheaded, then the Labour Party's memorandum of understanding with the Greens could turn out to be vital when the votes are counted after the 2017 general election.
One advantage of this agreement was demonstrated on Tuesday when TVNZ published a Colmar Brunton poll which not only showed the Greens and Labour closing the gap with National by 3 per cent, TVNZ political editor Corin Dann, chose a graphic which combined Labour and Green support and showed this opposition bloc within reach of success.
In politics, perception is crucial and with one "poll of polls" last week showing the gap between National and the Labour/Green bloc at around 5 per cent, a defeat for National looks possible.
The Green Party has long sought such an agreement with Labour and I had just such a strategy presented to me years ago during several meetings with the late Rod Donald in a Wellington restaurant.
It never flew in those days, largely because the Helen Clark Labour-led Government was spoiled for coalition partner choices in the one election where the Greens could have featured.
This agreement was rightly dubbed a "non-aggression pact" by Radio New Zealand's Kathryn Ryan.
It lapses on Election Day, giving both parties the freedom to choose whatever partner suits them in the post-election wash-up and really only binds both parties to act in good faith with each other and collaborate in Parliament.
The same poll which showed the Labour/Green bloc creeping up on National contained a bombshell for Mr Key, though the result was published the night after the main poll.
Colmar Brunton asked the same people who put National support at 48 per cent "should the Government build more houses". A stunning 72 per cent said yes, with only 22 per cent disagreeing.
This amounts to an emphatic endorsement of the Labour Party's "Kiwibuild" policy.
Labour's 2014 policy statement said, "Labour will oversee and invest in a large-scale 10-year programme of home building focused on modest entry-level houses for sale to first home buyers. We will partner with the private sector, community agencies and local government to build these houses. Our target is to ramp up to building 10,000 houses a year by the end of our first term (or as swiftly as the availability of skilled labour allows), and to continue at this level for around 10 years."
In the campaign clamour around the "dirty tricks" fiasco, nobody noticed a great policy which has worked again and again in the history of New Zealand. Let's hope the right to your own home becomes a big issue next year.
Mike Williams grew up in Hawke's Bay. He is CEO of the New Zealand Howard League and a former Labour Party president. All opinions are his and not those of Hawke's Bay Today.
