Kevin Rudd (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the honourable member for Fremantle for her question. Can I say to the House that, if we are serious about tackling the challenge of climate change, we have to move on multiple fronts. We have to move on the proper price of carbon—hence the government’s proposed legislation on the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, which those opposite chose to vote against last week. We as a government have also put forward a renewable energy target which will be a quadrupling of the number of gigawatt hours generated in this country through renewable energy sources by 2020.

We are also moving, as the Minister for Resources and Energy indicated before, on the question of carbon capture and storage. It is not just the global institute which we have constructed—the Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute, which was launched conjointly with a number of leaders from around the world in L’Aquila at the G8 Plus summit only last month. It is our domestic initiatives as well in terms of our proposed investment at scale in large-scale carbon capture and storage. Fourthly, we are moving also on energy efficiency—hence the government’s agreement with the state and territory governments on a new national energy efficiency strategy. As part of our economic stimulus strategy we are rolling out some $4 billion worth of investment in energy efficiency measures in people’s homes. As the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts just indicated before, we are also embarking upon a new set of measures to make it more possible for people to install solar panels on the roof. All these measures are necessary in our combined efforts on climate change.

On the question of renewable energy, we are dealing with the particular challenge which has been delivered to us by the fact that so much has not happened on renewable energies in this country for so long. Those opposite finally got around to setting a so-called mandatory renewable energy target of five per cent back in 2001. They then got together a report—led by, I think, then Senator Tambling, from memory—and decided in 2003, in the formal conclusions of that government-chaired report, that this was simply inadequate, that it was not going to give sufficient support to the renewable energy sector and it needed to be increased. The Tambling report, a bit like the Ergas review, fell off the edge of the table—gone, disappeared. It has gone into Davy Jones’s locker. Then we come to the eve of the last election, and those opposite say, ‘Finally, it’s time to do a little bit about renewable energy—we’ll have a 15 per cent target.’ Of course, we have seen from them no concrete policy since. But what has happened in the real economy since then?

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