Tony Windsor (New England, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

It is with pleasure that I support the Down under: greenhouse gas storage report and endorse the remarks of the member for Mallee, the member for Moreton and our current chair, the member for Lyons. This is a very good committee. It has been very effective, both under the previous chairmanship of the member for Hume and currently under the member for Lyons. As most people would know, I was in the state parliament for 10 years, and being on a committee in New South Wales was something you did when you wanted to waste your time. In my view, those committees were not very effective and were very politicised, in the main. I have spent six years on this committee now and I would defy a stranger to come into the committee room while debate is taking place and identify particular individuals as running a party or philosophical line. The conduct of the committee has been very good. The minister that referred the inquiry to the committee, Martin Ferguson, was in fact a member of this committee previously. No doubt he could see that he would get genuine consideration of the issue at hand, rather than some game-playing activity that definitely would have happened if it had been introduced in the New South Wales parliament. I do congratulate my fellow members for the work they have done. They have actually done a lot more on this report than I have, because I was away for about a month.

This is an area that I do have some interest in: all the greenhouse gas issues—carbon emissions, methane, nitrous oxide—and the impact that they have on the longevity of the globe. I think these are exciting times that we are in. Too often this is seen as something that we would rather not face and something that we tend to be frightened of, whether that be in the agricultural sector or just as normal citizens reflecting on the possible impact on electricity prices or fossil fuel prices. There are a whole range of concerns that are very easy to beat up in a political sense.

I see Australia in particular as having the potential to lead this debate—and we are in terms of this legislation. I do thank the minister for actually bringing the draft legislation to a committee for consideration because therein lies a solution, a model, that we probably should develop in terms of an emissions trading scheme. What the minister has done has brought groups from both sides together to formulate a strategy on a particular proposal for the injection and storage of greenhouse gas—carbon dioxide. That is exactly what the parliament needs to do. If there were ever an issue where we needed to come together and establish a system that we can all back, this is it.

It is too easy to complicate this issue with simple solutions. It is too easy to say that the price of electricity will increase and therefore we should do nothing. It is too easy to blame one side or the other—this goes to the Labor government—about the impacts of an emissions trading scheme. Of course it is going to have an impact. Of course there will be some difficulties. I would challenge the opposition and the government to actually breathe in a little and try to formulate a path.

We could take the example set by this committee and establish a pathway where a common agenda can be driven, rather than taking the easy path of establishing some political agendas, whether they be the climate sceptic agenda or that every price increase from now on is going to be the fault of one K Rudd. We know those things are not true. The opposition is not full of climate sceptics in my view. Any increases in electricity are not going to be all the fault of the Prime Minister. But if we were able to establish a framework, as this report does around an emissions trading scheme, it would be far better for the population of Australia to see that leadership being expressed by the parliament rather than by a game that may well play on the fears of many people about the price of electricity and other activities.

As I said, I believe this is an exciting time in the formulation of legislation. This particular report is about how we successfully store greenhouse gases in Commonwealth offshore waters. There are other ways of addressing this problem as well. Essentially—and I am probably oversimplifying the issue—globally we have extracted carbon deeply buried in the mantle of the earth and emitted quite a lot of that back into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. That is one of the greenhouse gas problems that we have. It is not the only one. Methane, nitrous oxide and other gases play a minor role. In this case I am focusing on carbon dioxide. We have taken it out of the ground and put it in the air.

How do we get the situation back into balance? Some people would suggest the answer lies with trees—and we probably should stop chopping them down—and others suggest we should plant a few more. I and others have suggested that we develop more healthy soil technologies such as no-till farming and some of the pasture techniques that are out there now where there is less and less disturbance of the topsoil. That will have a positive effect on the natural sequestration of carbon in organic matter, humus, in the soil. Others would argue that is difficult to measure.

Measurement in a sense plays on the debate that is all around. You only enter this debate if you can make money out of it. If you cannot trade it, it is not worth looking at and to trade it there has to be a degree of certainty in terms of the market. I would argue and have argued to the Prime Minister and the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry that it is very important to look at this not only in terms of emissions trading but also in terms of drought policy and encouraging better techniques in the custodianship of our soils. If a by-product of that is a greater accumulation of carbon in the soil, so be it. If you can put a price on it, that is all to the better but I think the real benefits will be much greater to the long-term nature of the soil and the agricultural producers that look after that soil than any trading arrangement that could be put in place. Others would argue that that is nonsense.

Everybody has a view. I am aware of activity in your electorate, Mr Deputy Speaker Scott, and in the member for Capricornia’s electorate where work is being done on measurement of soil carbon with a view to being part of the process of putting the carbon dioxide back in the ground from whence we took it. This document Down under also looks at a framework to develop a storage program that can put it away so that it is not in the atmosphere.

I was in Canada a couple of years ago as part of a study tour and I visited an ethanol plant that had just been commissioned. I had had a little bit to do with ethanol plants and I noticed that there seemed to be more to this particular plant. There was a structure attached to the end of part of the plant. I said to the people there, ‘What is that?’ They had some convoluted name for it, but essentially it was a carbon capture device on the end of the ethanol plant. The carbon dioxide that was being emitted by this plant was being captured at source rather than released into the atmosphere. Essentially, some of the variations of this document are similar. In future we might have coal-fired power stations which have carbon capture facilities at the end, and that will be transferred back into the ground so that the nasty is taken out at source and stored in some way.

We are in a fascinating period of time really, and we really need to be progressing a whole range of research activities. In a sense, this relates to the food-fuel debate. Another part of this issue is deciding whether the priority is to feed ourselves or to keep ourselves cool. Some people would rather see a little bit less rain and temperatures two degrees higher than have no food. There is crossover in those debates. The debate in relation to biofuels production has been too simplistic in terms of whether it has to be food or whether it has to be fuel.

The interesting part of carbon capture at the ethanol plant that I was visiting was that it was seen as an asset, something to sell. One thing they were looking at doing—and there are people in Australia looking at exactly the same thing at the moment—was injecting the carbon dioxide into greenhouses to expedite the production of vegetables. It is known technology. An injection of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere of a growing plant—hydroponic tomatoes, for instance—will expedite its growth, if you can control that environment. Instead of looking at all these things and saying, ‘It is going to be too hard; the electricity bills are going to go up; there is a political dimension, so we can blame someone else for this and maybe win an election,’ I see an extraordinary capacity to launch the initiatives that a lot of Australian researchers have wanted to launch for years. In my view, it is time that we looked at this as a positive part of our history rather than a negative one.

The other day the Climate Institute released a document that talked about a computer model where people can feed different variables into the system. That document may not be totally correct, but I would encourage people to have a look at it because it is saying that we can achieve some of these targets—20 or 30 per cent, or whatever the numbers are—by 2020 without a significant increase in the cost of electricity. It can be done through a range of efficiency measures.

The key point I would like to make out of this whole report is this: it was a case where the government of the day said to the parliament of the day—that is, the parliament in miniature as a committee—‘Could you people have a look at this and try and find out something that we can agree on?’ and the committee has produced not only a model for developing a framework but also a model, in my view, for trying to address what is possibly the most significant issue any of us will address in our political careers. So I would encourage the government and the opposition to use this as a template—to put some of the simple politics aside and actually try to develop a process that solves the problem.

Many say, ‘We’re only two per cent of the world; we can do this and suffer all the consequences.’ But I think that does not put us behind; it puts us in front. At some stage—perhaps after the American election in a few months time and the various issues that could occur there—the world is going to cotton on to this. If Australia is in front of the game, I would rather be part of that process, because we have the opportunity to set the pace rather than lag behind and be sceptical about every activity that is happening in the parliament.

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