Pat Conroy (Charlton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I listened with great interest to the contributions from previous speakers, including the member for Swan and the member for Paterson, to this debate on the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (Repeal) Bill 2014. Yet again, they demonstrate, as all coalition members of parliament have demonstrated, a complete misunderstanding of industry development experience, the challenges of the renewable industry and the challenges of climate change.

I will start by remarking on the contribution from the members for Swan and Paterson, who lauded some great projects funded under ARENA. They were very proud, justifiably, of some of the projects. The logical question, then, is: if these projects are so deserving and they are so proud that ARENA funded them, why cancel this program? They are very proud to turn up at grant fundings. The member for Paterson, one of my neighbours, has turned up to the opening of envelopes, and grant announcements are his reason for getting out of bed in the morning. But he is often turning up to grant announcements for programs he then tries to cut. The consistency is just not there.

In this debate, on the abolition of the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, it is best to start from first principles. The first principle is a global need to combat climate change. Global warming is occurring, it is overwhelmingly man-made and each nation needs to make a contribution. By 2016, three billion people in this world will live in countries or provinces where there is an emissions trading scheme. So the world is taking action. We need to combat climate change. Australia needs to play its part.

And this is not just a great challenge; it is also a great opportunity to grow the jobs and industries of the future. Just as the countries that invested in steam and textiles, including Great Britain, dominated the first industrial revolution, and the countries that invested in and pioneered the work of steel and chemicals in the mid-19th century, the United States and Germany, dominated the second industrial revolution, and the United States and Japan, in the third industrial revolution, pioneered research into electronics in the middle of the 20th century, it is the countries that invest in clean energy products and clean energy technologies that will benefit most from the fourth industrial revolution, which we are beginning to see right now.

This government is squandering that opportunity. Across the globe more than US$250 billion was invested in clean energy technologies in the last year. This is the opportunity that we are squandering through the abolition of agencies such as ARENA. It is why Labor took action in the first place. I am proud to say that under the last Labor government jobs in the renewable energy industry tripled to 24,000, capacity in the wind sector tripled as well and solar PV installations on roofs grew from a paltry 7,000 under Prime Minister Howard to 1.2 million. This is a proud legacy of Labor, and ARENA was a vital part of this legacy. It complemented our other initiatives, most principally carbon pricing, putting a price on the negative environmental externality of carbon pollution—a policy that will stand the test of time, a policy that is consistent with what the rest of the world is doing, a policy that is economically literate and was the recommendation of every reputable economist around the country, unlike their dog of a scheme, direct action, which is an orphan their own front bench such as the member for Wentworth label a fig leaf for doing nothing.

So the carbon price was a vital foundation for our action to combat climate change and grow our renewable energy industry. This was complemented by policies to support the growth of renewable energy across the entire innovation chain, which was ARENA, the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and then the renewable energy target, which all complemented each other, targeting different parts of the innovation chain and identified market failures. ARENA combated the need to invest heavily in research and development. The Clean Energy Finance Corporation supported proof of type, the first large-scale prototype technologies being deployed into the market. The RET came in to support mature technologies to ensure their widespread deployment. Each part of these programs complemented each other and, I would argue, can be held up as a great example of industry policy targeting each part of a market failure to give us the best chance of developing a new industry.

What has the new government done when it has come into power? It has committed to destroying all this architecture that gave us our best chance to combat climate change and grow these industries. They have abolished the carbon price, they are trying to abolish the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and they are trying now to abolish ARENA. If you believe the reports in the newspapers, they are also well on the path to abolishing the renewable energy target. The last two things—abolishing ARENA and RET—are in direct contradiction to their commitments before the election. This is a coalition of two political parties that talk endlessly about keeping their election commitments, but they have breached so many I do not have time to list them all. They gave a clear commitment to maintaining the RET and they gave a clear commitment to maintaining ARENA, and they are breaking both of them.

What is even worse is that, not only are they breaking commitments to keep previous policies started by Labor; they are also breaking their own commitments to start new programs. The so-called Minister for the Environment was very proud of his one million solar roofs program that first appeared in 2010 and was a key feature of their Direct Solutions pamphlet that was the Prime Minister's shield whenever he went campaigning. That has disappeared completely—not a mention of it in the budget—abolished before it even started. This demonstrates yet again that the Minister for the Environment and, in fact, the Minister for Industry have no influence in cabinet. They are pariahs. I am surprised they even get invited to cabinet meetings, because anything they put up is said no to.

And what is the impact of all this? The impact is huge sovereign risk issues. Let me read a quote from the so-called Minister for the Environment from the lead-up to the 2013 election: 'One of the things we don't want to do is become a party where there is wild sovereign risk, where businesses take steps to their detriment on the basis of a pledge and policy of government. We're very clear that that's not what we want to be.' He is clearly out on a limb there, because that is exactly what they are going. Abolishing ARENA in a clear breach of an election commitment and abolishing RET or, at the minimum, incredibly watering it down are clear sovereign risk issues that industry will be deeply impacted by.

What is at stake? What is at stake is 24,000—and growing—jobs in the renewable energy industry and $18 billion of future investment. This is what is at stake by the economically irresponsible actions of those opposite that have already seen investment in this sector dry up. In the first half of 2014 investment in large-scale renewable energy in this country has fallen to $40 million. Not $40 billion—$40 million in the first half of this year. That is the lowest level of investment in 14 years and contrasts deeply with the $2.7 billion invested by the private sector in renewable energy in 2013.

It is not just aggregate figures where this drying up of investment is occurring. It is also identifiable in projects such as the cancellation of Australia's largest solar farm. This project was cancelled a few weeks ago, and the industry actors that were investing in this clearly identified the sovereign risk issues imperilled by this government as a direct cause. They identified the abolition of ARENA and the complete inconsistency and speculation around the RET as driving this impact. So we have seen investment in this sector drop from $2.7 billion last year to $40 million. This is a complete disgrace and mortgaging our future on the economically irresponsible actions of those opposite.

It is vital that we grow this industry as those opposite destroy traditional industries. They have already destroyed the automotive sector. They have already killed 50,000 direct jobs in the automotive sector and another 200,000 indirect jobs. Not only are they content to destroy traditional industries and impact the manufacturing regions of this country like the northern suburbs of Adelaide, Newcastle, the western suburbs of Sydney or areas of Brisbane; they are trying to put a bullet into industries that could fill that gap such as renewable energy. This is a great tragedy. We are the equivalent of a country investing in the horse-and-buggy industry in the early 20th century as the United States and other countries invested in automotive manufacturing. This is a government committed to driving us back not to the 1950s but to the 1850s, and they will be condemned by history for their actions on all this.

We have heard from the other side about how governing is about choices, you have to be responsible and we live in tight fiscal times. I completely agree that governing is about choices and deciding competing fiscal priorities. I ask then: why is it fair to spend $68 billion over the next decade on a ridiculous Paid Parental Leave scheme while cutting investment in significant programs that will grow jobs and secure the economic future of this country? Why is it fair to spend $68 billion so that wealthy mothers in the seats of North Sydney and Warringah can get $50,000 to have a baby while mothers in my electorate of Charlton get less than $20,000? Why is that fair when the government is destroying programs that are helping advance the economic future of this country? Why is it fair for them to abandon sensible taxation measures to cut down on multinational tax evasion, measures that would save the bottom line over $1 billion over the forward estimates, while they cut serious programs that would grow the jobs of the future in Australia? The truth is that governing is about choices, and almost every single decision, every single choice, the government have made has been clearly wrong. The great tragedy is that they are mortgaging not only their future but also Australia's future. They are condemning our children and our grandchildren to a rust-belt economy, an economy that will be the laughing stock of the rest of the world.

It is important to go back to some comments made by Asian countries in the early 1980s when Australia faced similar choices about our economic path. The then Prime Minister of Singapore, in 1980, said that Australia was becoming the 'poor white trash of Asia'. Given that period was a period of stagflation of an economy with very high inflation and industries that were overprotected and, quite frankly, not globally competitive, that description, while very brutal, was very apt. A reformist Labor government under Prime Ministers Hawke and Keating came in, made very significant economic reforms and put in place the foundations that have led to over 20 years of uninterrupted economic growth, with industries that are outwardly focused, globally competitive and able to export around the world.

We face a similar choice here, where we have a regressive government; a government not of conservatism but of reaction; a government driven by DLP sympathisers like the Prime Minister; a government determined to return to the past. This legislation is symbolic of that attempt to return to the past and abandon investment in serious industries like the renewable energy industry. As I said, it will be our children and grandchildren who will suffer from this. It will not just be employment, jobs and high living standards; it will be about taking action on climate change. That is one of our greatest obligations: to leave the planet a better place than we found it.

I notice the member for Riverina is at the dispatch box. He represents an electorate that will be one of the regions that suffers the most under climate change. The Garnaut report has forecast that if climate change is not combated we will see a 98 per cent reduction in farming in the Murray-Darling area—an area that the member for Riverina purports to represent. That is a choice we face in legislation like this where we have a choice of combating climate change—

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