Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

It is always a thrill to follow this member because you realise just how much those on that side of the House are completely out of touch with what is happening in the rest of the world, even in the conservative side of politics. If one were to ask the Conservative Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, David Cameron, what they are doing to tackle climate change and what steps they are taking to support a renewable energy industry in their country, one would learn that, even though they participate in the European emissions trading scheme, they are looking at increasing their carbon tax—and it is a tax in that country—because they have been worried that the level of the price imposed on carbon was not high enough to allow them to develop offshore wind to the point necessary to give confidence to investors to make the substantial amounts of investment that they would need to deliver long-term offshore winds. These are expensive projects that are being done for the first time and that need the kind of government support that the government gave dirty energy when it was built for the first time. If you were to go to the United Kingdom you would hear them there saying, 'Yes, we want offshore wind, and we will do what we need to do to sustain it.'

If one were to go to Germany—an economy that is a shining light at the moment in the European crisis—and ask the conservative chancellor of Germany and the conservative government what they are doing there, they would say, 'By 2050 we are going to get 80 per cent of our electricity produced from renewable energy, and we are phasing out nuclear power.' What you would also find, if you went and asked the conservatives in Germany about progress there, is that last year they produced 20 per cent of their electricity from renewables. They are ahead of their target.

During the recent cold snap in France, France, with all its nuclear power, got energy imported into the grid from renewable-energy-rich Germany because they ran out. In Germany they got 20 per cent of their electricity last year from renewables. How did it happen? It happened because the government got behind it when there were Greens in government, a long time ago, who helped set these settings that have been continued by the conservatives. There are now 382,000 jobs in the renewable energy sector in Germany. That is around 102,000 jobs in Australian numbers, or more than twice as much as in coalmining, oil and gas put together. That is the kind of future we can have in Australia if we as parliamentarians and we as a government get behind the clean energy industry and give it the kind of support that governments previously did and still continue to give to polluting energy. And that is something that you never hear the modest members talk about: the enormous $15 billion subsidies per year that are given to coal and dirty, polluting industries.

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