Sharon Bird (Cunningham, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Vocational Education) Share this | Hansard source

It's those rascally economists again.

The bills before this House remove a cap on pollution, so there is nothing in the response to the challenge we face that will provide the discipline needed to meet supposed agreed targets. This is not action. It will fail the environment and it will fail the economy. It does not even pass the basic test of risk management that a government owes future generations.

Only last week that other rascally progressive, the British Prime Minister, outlined this very issue. He said:

… I'm not a scientist but it's always seemed to me one of the strongest arguments about climate change is, even if you're only 90 per cent certain or 80 per cent certain or 70 per cent certain, if I said to you there's a 60 per cent chance your house might burn down do you want to take out some insurance? You take out some insurance.

There is a cost to this lost opportunity in particular, and in the short amount of time remaining to me I just want to make two points. One is that Australia can, has been and could be a world leader in innovations in renewables, in energy efficiency, in new production processes and methods if it were backed by a scheme in this nation that drove viability for those sorts of innovations. And, as a small aside, I would add that the provision of fibre to the premises under Labor's NBN would have assisted in unleashing, through the upload capacity it would provide, a whole new arena of energy monitoring and management on a scale that would be a significant opportunity for new business and export markets. Sadly, that is not the case.

I would like to finish with a local story of global achievement in this space from my own backyard, Wollongong. In August this year a team of students from the University of Wollongong and TAFE Illawarra, Team UOW, won first place in the solar decathlon in China. China is part of the most recent addition to the US Department of Energy solar decathlon team. The decathlon was hosted Datong and the Wollongong team beat 19 the teams from around the world. They were the first team from Australia to successfully gain entry to the solar decathlon and were offered positions both in China and the US. They were the first team ever, in any of the competitions, to demonstrate how to retrofit an existing home and they achieved the highest overall score in any solar decathlon competition in history. My great congratulations to Professor Paul Cooper, Marty Burgess from TAFE and the wonderful students on an outstanding result.

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