Wilson Tuckey (O'Connor, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It was unfortunate that I could only spend about five or six minutes listening to the member for Kingsford Smith’s speech on the Environment and Heritage Legislation Amendment Bill (No. 1) 2006. He is speedily leaving the premises so as not to hear some comments on the remarks he made in the last minutes of that speech. It was pretty interesting to hear him say a couple of things which in simplistic terms I agree with. He mentioned huge areas of species extinction. What he did not go on to say was that the most threatened group of indigenous species are grassland species. The Mitchell grasses of the far north and other grassland areas did not have one tree on them when Europeans first set out to settle in this country. Being one of those who is tree-centric, the member for Kingsford Smith has argued over the years that you do not knock down trees to save grass.

The Indigenous people burnt the grass every year and killed off the gidgee, and now we have intrusions of exotic species. I heard the other night that people are looking to satellite imagery to track these species, and there are thousands of acres of them. But you are not allowed to go in and knock them down either, because you might knock down a gidgee. The gidgee has destroyed the grass, and we wonder why we have got a category of endangered species. We now refer to these areas as forest, and they never were.

It is the same when the member for Kingsford Smith says our rivers are in crisis. According to his definition, the Darling was in crisis when it was first discovered by the explorer Sturt. He suddenly discovered a river stream. His cattle were dying of thirst and, when they got into the river bed, what was there? A trickle and it was as salty as the sea. In a later exploration, he got to Lake Alexandrina, the pride of Adelaide, and he could not get his rowboat across because it was so shallow. The further he progressed to the sea, the saltier it got and his plans were shattered when he could not get his rowboat into the ocean to join up with some vessel that was supposed to be there to collect him. He had to row back up the river because the river mouth was closed. That is now held up as national tragedy.

The Murray-Darling system was Australia’s biggest stormwater drain and it reverted to pools and little streams every year. That is a crisis for Australia, but it is not a crisis for the river because that is the natural state of the river as it is in other parts of Australia. Instead of being able to have proper debate on these matters, we have people who have built a sufficient personal reputation to get them into this parliament, like the member for Kingsford Smith, who promote arguments but never state the facts—that might be a problem for the legal profession in the wider experience.

Again, he throws in the one-liner of climate change. What solution is offered to this House to fix climate change for the world? Australia, for all the ridiculous argument that we are a high per capita generator of greenhouse gases, produces about one per cent of the world’s emissions. How do we achieve most of that? Not by the gross overuse of energy by the household sector—that is about 13 per cent of all the energy consumed in Australia. We have got state governments running around—and I think even our own government to a degree—targeting the household sector at a huge cost to homeowners, and it is a flea on the back of an elephant.

The reality is that we produce a lot of greenhouse gas supplying to other countries products like aluminium, otherwise known as congealed electricity. We provide that product so that other countries emit less. We provide liquefied natural gas so they can emit less and, throughout that process, even in the liquefaction of the gas, we create significant emissions. We create them from the natural gas itself. The great challenge to the Gorgon Project is the very high percentage of carbon dioxide that exists in the gas as it resides in the earth. Simply all natural gas has a component of CO and it must be removed. It is exhausted to the atmosphere in the liquefaction process because it liquefies ahead of the methane and other components of natural gas, and it would in fact solidify and clog the system. We do that for the benefit of others.

As I have reminded my party room recently—and unfortunately it fell on too many deaf ears at the top—and the West Australian newspaper by press release, 10 per cent is the amount of gas that has to be consumed to liquefy natural gas. Put in simpler terms, if you produce one million tonnes of natural gas you burn, for the generation of electricity, 100,000 tonnes of natural gas. Yet in the vicinity of our natural gas resources off the north-west coast of Western Australia, we have a tidal resource equal to all of the energy consumed in Australia of every variety. Nobody wants to go and do anything about it—neither the government nor the opposition.

The opposition’s response to greenhouse emissions is to sign a bit of paper. All of those who have signed so far have not complied with its conditions. We, a country that has not ratified the Kyoto protocol, in fact have a better record than many who have committed to it. It excludes the major emitters. It is reported that China is building a powerhouse per week, each of which is larger than those operating in Australia, and they are burning any sort of coal they can get for that purpose.

But there is this tidal resource. We are aware of high-voltage DC transmission technology which will allow this electricity to be delivered over lengthy distances. Here we are with that resource and nobody is suggesting government investment at both the federal and state level along with private sector investment. It is a tragedy that we have masses—close to $1 trillion—of superannuation funds, including the industry funds, and people are running all around the world building tollways in Canada and buying up the water infrastructure of London, yet they will not invest a cent in infrastructure within Australia. That infrastructure would create a viable, reliable energy generation capacity.

In fact, the great asset of tidal power is that its fuel is capital but its running costs are virtually nil. The French have been producing 350 megawatts of tidal power at La Rance for 40 years. I am advised that during that period even the maintenance cost of that generating equipment has been nearly nothing. We have a tidal resource that averages 11 metres twice a day. That is four cycles for a tidal generator: tide in, tide out; tide in, tide out. Everybody knows it is there. The topography lends itself to the construction of tidal power generators. And now we have a base customer—the liquefied natural gas sector. We could reduce its emissions by 10 per cent. We could have 10 per cent more gas to liquefy and sell. There are other opportunities once you create that base load. There is a huge bauxite deposit at Mitchell Plateau—the basis of an integrated aluminium industry. Aluminium, as I have previously said, is known as congealed electricity.

I invite the member for Kingsford Smith to convince his leader to stand up in this place and gazump our government for its neglect of that facility. But he might in the process also attack the Western Australian government for its failure to do anything about it. We have Premier Carpenter putting at risk all of the projects there by demanding that 20 per cent—or I think it is now 15 per cent—of the gas produced must be retained for Western Australia, without any understanding of what that means or whether it will frighten off investment due to sovereign risk. In fact, he could be saying: ‘I’m going to ask the federal government, along with the private sector, to help me to put in these tidal generators. I want to swap that for 10 per cent of the gas for electricity which you are burning already.’ The Brouse development is yet to even start and it wants 900 megawatts of electricity—that would be a nuclear power station if you want to go down that the road.

I look at the amendments of the members opposite. There is another pious amendment. They are saying all of these things like, ‘The bill is being rushed through the parliament.’ The debates on these things have taken place for both parties back in the committee rooms. They say, ‘The Howard government has failed to halt the decline in Australia’s natural environment and best agricultural land.’ I have just covered that. The state governments—New South Wales at the forefront and Queensland not far behind—are declaring trees that never existed to be remnant vegetation and refusing farmers the right to reinstate the natural grasslands. We have built weirs and dams along our river system, and I approve of that. They suggest that there is something wrong with the rivers because they are now going dry. But that is their natural state and it is ridiculous to talk about them in this fashion.

The member for Kingsford Smith, in the five or six minutes I was here, started to talk about wind farms and the fact that the minister is over in China doing something that we are not encouraging here. Why should we not encourage wind farms? They are a fraud. The rated capacity of these things is quoted. It is recognised that they never achieve better than 30 per cent of that rated capacity, but, what is more, unless they can be backed up with a highly responsive generator—in the case of small operations, a diesel generator; in the case of Tasmania, hydro; and even, to an extent, gas—you can manage their productivity or lack thereof.

Even the sparkies referred to by the member for Perth the other day will tell you that, in a coal-fired base power station, you have to make a decision at, say, three o’clock in the afternoon about starting to burn coal and generate steam for the five or six o’clock demand, when housewives and others turn on their electric stoves or whatever. You lack responsiveness. So what are the coal generators doing at present when the wind varies over five-minute intervals and the generating capacity of the wind towers is affected? They burn the coal in anticipation. They have to keep the pressure up because they do not know just how much power will come out of those wind generators. So they are burning as much coal as they did before and we have all the expensive infrastructure loading costs onto the basic network.

There is nothing wrong with a wind generator provided you do not connect it to the grid. An example was posted in the Australian newspaper recently: 150 megawatts of wind-generated capacity in New Zealand suffers variations in productivity of 100 megawatts—roughly 70 per cent—over five-minute intervals, and the power transmission people have more trouble when it goes up than when it comes down, because it is likely to start frying people’s equipment. What is the good of that? By the way, tidal power is cyclical, but you can predict, as we stand here, peak tide a hundred years from now. Moon power, of course, generates the tides—the circumnavigation of the moon—and, I might add, other factors within the subsea topography.

Let me just tell you how bad the interference of bureaucracy is. In my electorate, in a town called Hopetoun, which is becoming a dormitory suburb for BHP Billiton’s $1.8 billion laterite nickel development, we assisted the state electricity commission to erect a 600-kilowatt wind generator. It is backed up by a 700-kilowatt diesel generator. That is quite a suitable package. I am advised that, consequently, there has been a reduction in diesel fuel consumption. Diesel motors, of course, are responsive to the variations I have mentioned. There is barely any industry in that township. At around nine o’clock to 11 o’clock they turn out the lights, and that is always the time when the wind blows strongest. So I suggested to the minister that we ought to supply some money to buy an electrolysis unit—you can buy them off the shelf. For the same purpose, the Canadian government has just donated one to a Patagonian town. They have more brains than Australia does. They are doing exactly what I am now going to propose.

I said: while the wind generator is going around at night time and there is virtually no demand, why not make hydrogen by electrolysis—a schoolboy experiment—and use the fuel to power a conversion on your diesel motor that backs up the wind tower at times of high demand? To the minister’s credit—and he was just criticised by the member for Kingsford Smith—he said, ‘What a good idea.’ He invited me to have a discussion with one of his officials, who lied to me for half an hour. The environmental public servant told me, ‘You can’t store hydrogen.’ I do not know how they manage at Cape Canaveral while they are waiting for the weather to be suitable for a launch! Enough hydrogen is made in the world today to provide for 200 million hydrogen fuel cell motor cars, and I have an official telling me, ‘The atoms are too small, Mr Tuckey. It’d all leak out of the tank.’

Well, driving around Perth are three hydrogen fuel cell buses—there is a gaggle of them around the world for a developmental project—and, of course, they have fuel tanks containing hydrogen. Tomorrow BMW will sell you a 7 series limousine containing a fuel tank, like a thermos flask, with liquid hydrogen in it. The limousine’s internal combustion motor runs on either hydrogen or petrol. Why can’t this parliament focus on the practical solutions to an identifiable problem? Let us not have all these fear campaigns and silly arguments that you can create jobs out of the Kyoto protocol by letting people trade in the futures market—a very dangerous area, as AWB Ltd has just discovered. Unfortunately, I have run out of time, Mr Deputy Speaker, but thanks for your cooperation. (Time expired)

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