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

I have always wondered why the member for Kingsford Smith decided to give up the law for a rock singer’s career, but the illogical arguments he put to this place today probably demonstrate how few people wanted to get him to draw up a contract on their behalf. He claims as illogical the statements of the Minister for the Environment and Water Resources and the Minister for Finance and Administration when of course he overlooks the fact that in any business—and when your business constituency happens to be the people of Australia—you do not sign contracts until they are written in a fashion which you find acceptable. The minister for the environment says, ‘We would like to see the Kyoto arrangements amended,’ and Mr Garrett suggests that that is impossible unless you have already signed up to unacceptable amendments. No, you can say to those who are reviewing that thing, ‘If you want us as a signatory, these are the matters that must be included.’ That is how a government operates in the interests of its people. It becomes party to a contract or a treaty when the contents of that particular treaty are in the interests of the Australian people. And what a farce has been Kyoto. It says the largest and most populous emitters in the world should be excluded because they have low per capita GDP.

I thought we were talking about emissions—the stuff that goes up into the atmosphere. As those of us who travel across Australia by air know, when you get up there at flight level the winds are running at 200 or 300 kilometres an hour and they do not stop when they get to India and say, ‘Oops, we are not allowed to go here; we do not want their emissions on board.’ The fact is that this is an international situation and the issue is emissions.

Today we are debating the National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting Bill 2007, which is designed to set up a reporting mechanism and, as the explanatory memorandum reminds me, lays the foundation for the Australian emissions trading system—it will provide the data upon which a trading system may be created. This was announced by the Prime Minister on 17 July 2007. Robust data reported under this bill will form the basis of emissions liabilities under emissions trading and will inform decision making during the establishment of the emissions trading system, including with regard to permit allocation and incentives for early abatement action. Why would that be the purpose of this legislation? The first thing is that we might learn from the mad rush of the European Union to get into a trading system that collapsed. At one stage there were so many certificates issued—for whatever reasons, possibly including corrupt activity—that they traded down to nought. We were urged throughout that period to get with the strength—to have a system that lacked a proper database and was consequently a waste of time. So there is a process. Without a database collected over a significant period of time, any trading system is bound to be a failure.

I note also that, after talking up the fact that this bill lacked substance, the member for Kingsford Smith put forward a pious amendment. There is not a word in it suggesting how the bill might be improved technically—just talk. He might have put it to music. The reality is that the government—presumably to some extent in response to the Senate committee—has already proposed amendments that will be debated at a later stage, and their excellence will be properly defended in due course by the minister.

I wrote down the points made by the member for Kingsford Smith. Coming back to the Kyoto agreement, he said, ‘Oh, they do not think it is a failed document,’ but of course it is a failed document. It is a document that, as I said, ignores completely the emissions of what is now the world’s largest emitter. Also, as he read a section of the Kyoto agreement, he made some interesting but illogical arguments about what ‘economic effect’ means. But you can read that in two ways: either as giving special privilege to those of low per capita GDP or the economic effect on a developed economy like Australia’s is a reason for care and caution and preferential treatment—otherwise, this country and this government could find itself destitute because it will have signed away its right to export and utilise its own natural resources.

It is also interesting that the member for Kingsford Smith started to give us a list of the 100 or so jobs that have been lost because certain manufacturing activity has gone elsewhere. The manufacturers have gone elsewhere to get a bigger subsidy than they could get out of the Australian taxpayer. These are not productive jobs. These are not self-sustaining jobs. They are jobs that rely heavily on cross-subsidy, and that of course always visits upon the consumer. We all know that governments of the opposition’s persuasion have a long history of creating tax subsidised jobs, with the obvious problem that in each case they add to inflation because they have no foundation in productivity. In Western Australia the state government has apparently created 18,000 new jobs since it came to office, but none of them are in the service sectors of hospitals, schools or the police force. I can only come to the conclusion that they are people who are employed in capacities like that which we are discussing today whose principal task is to tell you what we are not allowed to do any more. We wonder why a table was published the other day in the Sunday Times newspaper pointing out that, since 2004, Australia has sunk to No. 8 as a desirable location for mining investment and is now below Namibia and Botswana. Why might that be? It is certainly very obvious in Western Australia, where environmental departments are preventing development of mining activities that are very essential to my electorate. What is more, a mining activity that was conducted in 1968 without destroying certain flora is now prevented from acting because it might destroy the flora. Mr Deputy Speaker, I draw your attention to the foolishness of that. We of course propose an emissions trading system, but it had better be a good one.

In the processes of the Kyoto agreement, they have Conferences of the Parties, with the acronym COP. It is an interesting fact that, by the time they got to COP6, the biggest interest and lobby group in attendance was the financial institutions. Do you think they were particularly interested in the fact that carbon was being emitted into the atmosphere with dire climatic consequences? No. It was a new deal; they could swing the bookies bag on another arrangement that of course would bring them great profit and great deals.

The purpose of carbon trading, as I understand it—notwithstanding in my mind that it will add to the cost of energy and other items that we utilise, such as transport et cetera—is that the trading mechanism will make certain other investments more viable. But when we settle down to these things—when we bemoan the fact as the member for Kingsford Smith did that a wind generator plant in Tasmania closed for lack of new customers—it is time we looked at the effectiveness of wind generation as it applies to a grid system.

We are well aware that you can generate electricity with the wind. No doubt if we were to go into the entire song repertoire of the member for Kingsford Smith, we would probably find he has sung something about the vagaries of the wind. And that is the problem. In New Zealand there is 170 megawatts—two fields actually, but closely adjoining—of rated wind generation capacity that is experiencing variations of 100 megawatts over five-minute intervals. I am told the distribution network has more problems when that generation capacity revives and goes up than it does when it is coming down. Any middle manager and worker in the power distribution and generation industry will tell you that, where that baseload power generation happens to be coal or coal fired type capacity, there is no immediate responsive capacity to accommodate those particular circumstances other than maintaining, if you like, steam pressure at a level that allows for the baseload station to take over the entire generating capacity, even momentarily, of the wind generating system. In other words, they are still burning the coal but they are frequently exhausting the steam because it is not needed at a particular moment.

If you get down into my electorate, at Hopetoun we have a little twin generator system there providing wind power backed up by a couple of diesel genera-tors. I would like to tell you a bit more about the problems of that town, which has just had a nearly $3 billion mine built there. The state government has not yet built a water treatment plant for the people who want to live there, so half of them are flying in flying out when it is a very desirable location. But that system is saving a lot of diesel because of the responsiveness of the diesel generators that can tick over on idle and then boost up to achieve demand for whatever reason, including a failure of the wind generators to meet their rated capacity. I might add on the installation of the second one, which was subsidised significantly by this government, I suggested that maybe the surplus energy that comes off those wind generators—it just happens to be a fact of life that the wind usually blows strongest when the lights are out—might be converted by the simple schoolboy act of electrolysis to fuel one of those diesel motors or in fact a gas motor if anybody wanted to take a short cut. The minister thought that was a good idea, but his public service, the greenhouse people we currently employ, tried to tell me that you could not store hydrogen. I do not know what NASA have been doing all these years and how they have managed when the weather is against a launch and they have 1,000 tonnes of liquefied hydrogen sitting on a tank.

People get carried away by the songs of the member for Kingsford Smith and do not look at the practical application. I might add, in the case of both solar and wind generation, if it were utilised as I have proposed—for instance, on farming properties to create hydrogen as the fuel to drive the machinery of that farming property—that could be a very positive application of a renewable nature. But neither solar nor wind fit in the grid pattern and I sincerely hope, when this reporting system comes to bear, that we will ask the liquefied natural gas industry of my state to report on the emissions associated with their liquefaction processes because they burn 10 per cent of the equivalent of their gas exports in the liquefaction process.

The government chortled the other day about signing an agreement with the Chinese over the Browse field, which is as yet totally undeveloped. To achieve the targets similar to that export, it has to have a 900-megawatt electrical generating power station. That is of course the size of a nuclear power station. Their proposal is to burn gas when on their doorstep is a huge tidal resource that could not only provide that energy in a renewable sense but would allow for an extra 10 per cent of exports of gas.

It is all right for us to keep preaching that gas is a clean form of energy. It just happens to be cleaner than coal. It is a hydrocarbon and as such there is a representative emission standard. Most natural gas in varying quantities has a component of CO₂ in its makeup. In fact for that reason the Gorgon people must put their liquefaction plant on Barrow Island where they have access to used-up gas and petroleum bores and they can pump down something like 14 per cent of CO_{2 ,}which naturally occurs in gas. That is fine, but the reality is that these things have to be recognised.

A reporting system, as proposed in this legislation, is going to separate a lot of the myth from the reality, and the government is to be congratulated on that. There are wonderful opportunities for the government for a hydrogen economy in Australia. The government should be doing more to encourage foreign firms to bring in their expertise in that regard. The Ford company broke a record the other day; I think they hit 207 or 270 kilometres an hour with a fuel cell car. I have reminded this House previously of an initiative of the Richard Court government to order three fuel cell buses. They have been running around Perth, as they do around London and other places in the Northern Hemisphere, and they are both efficient and absolutely clean, because their only emission in operation is steam. I have been behind them. I have visited their workshops; I have visited their workshops in London. All the reports I have had are that they are very viable. On the resource of hydrogen that some use, London people import it liquefied from France. They just might be producing it with the 250 megawatts of tidal power they have produced at La Rance for the last 40 years. I just do not know how, if the Public Service of Australia believe you cannot store hydrogen, they manage to get it across the English Channel. There are all sorts of options of this nature, particularly with the foundation of a proper reporting system.

In looking at some of the so-called clean, green energy, for anybody who wants to assess a wind tower or any other sort of clean energy provider, the first test is this: how much energy of other natures did you use to make it? All of these things should be looked at closely. I do not contest the issue of climate change. I do not think it is even worth arguing about. Australia is fortunate in having some of the best, largest, ‘greenhouse with grunt’ types of renewable energy resources in the world. I have not had time to mention hot rocks, which has a future because it is compatible with grid distribution. All of those things will be tested by this reporting system, and it is a good and cautious government that takes that step first. If you want to deny that the EU treats Kyoto as a non-tariff barrier then you do not know what you are talking about. Their trading system is the joke of the world. Of those who agreed, signed up and ratified that agreement, hardly one has ever met the targets to which they committed. They have been unable to meet those targets. (Time expired)

See this speech in context