Butler encourages students to speak up

FEDERAL Shadow Minister for Climate Change and Energy Mark Butler has urged the next generation of voters to speak up on the issues that matter to them.

Mr Butler spoke to an audience of Year 8 and Year 12 students about climate change and other related issues at Surf Coast Secondary College, alongside Labor candidate for Corangamite Libby Coker.

He said he was encouraged that the students were already thinking about and discussing such topics.

“Some of the stuff we deal with in the national Parliament is not really going to have an impact on me, because I’m too old – it’s going to have an impact on you,” he said.

“The more you think about and have an opinion about some of these issues, the better your lives are going to be, because these are the things that are going to determine what sort of country you grow up in, and the world you grow up in.”

There were several questions from the audience about electric cars – including if they would be compulsory and the dangers of them being hacked – and Mr Butler said he expected Australia would follow the lead of countries that had vowed to phase out petrol and diesel cars by 2040.

“In some countries – take Norway, for example – already half of the cars sold now are electric vehicles.

“The life of a car – from the time you start drawing it to the showroom at the end – is about 20 years. And what year is it now?

“In Australia, you’ll still be buying petrol-engined cars for a number of years, but by the 2030s, they’ll be electric, most of them; and they’ll increasingly be driverless.”