Alannah Mactiernan (Perth, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am very disappointed with the member for Forrest—she is actually an intelligent, capable person. I cannot believe that the twaddle we have just heard from her. There was not one mention of climate change. She says she supports science and wants to see us being informed by science in the decisions we make. Yet scientists across Australia and the world are telling us that we are facing an enormous challenge in terms of global warming; that this global warming has been created by man; and that we need to take action to reduce our carbon footprint. All we hear from the other side is bleating—this uninformed, unintelligent bleating about green tape and red tape. The other side of the House are wrapping our planet in black tape—they are wrapping our planet in a cloud of fossil-fuel emissions and they are not prepared to do anything about it.

The whole premise of the member for Forrest's speech was that the most important thing that we can do is reduce costs. I would challenge that that is the most important thing to do but, even if that were the premise, putting energy efficiency in place is the critical thing. It is one of the critical things we have to do to put ourselves on the path to an economic future. This piece of legislation, which has been modified to some extent—and we as a party are supporting these modifications—offers an economic incentive for those who build and manage commercial buildings to ensure that these buildings operate in an energy efficient way. That incentive saves money for business; it saves money for small business. Those who do not build commercial buildings now have an option to make massive savings to their bottom line by leasing buildings that have been designed to be energy efficient. We have to put a market signal in there, and having mandatory disclosure is part of that market signal. In turn mandatory disclosure drives behaviour; it ensures that those people who construct large commercial buildings now have a financial incentive to invest up-front in the design and the technology that goes into a more energy efficient way of operating those buildings, while reducing our carbon footprint and reducing the costs.

The great tragedy in this piece of legislation is that we are not moving forward in the way that was planned in 2009, when COAG agreed that the states and the Commonwealth would come together to develop a national partnership agreement on energy efficiency. It was agreed in 2009 that not only would energy efficiency disclosure requirements apply to commercial buildings but also to residential buildings so that if you were selling or on-selling you would have a mandatory disclosure or a star rating for the home you were buying. I have to say it was a great tragedy that that was deferred in 2011-2012 because the states lost interest and they peeled away their support for what was a cooperative arrangement. I think we have done a great disservice to the people of Australia—to those young people who are buying new houses or apartments. We are sentencing them to a lifetime of high costs because we have not given the market signal or the incentive for property developers or builders to get their act together and put in place the technologies that would deliver a cheaper cost of living for them.

When I was a minister in state government we did a great deal of research on lifting standards in home building. We required a greater degree of energy efficiency, and we did very, very detailed cost-benefit analyses. This was resisted mindlessly and violently by the industry at the time. They said, 'It's going to increase the cost of housing.' The economic analysis that we did showed that, whilst there was, I agree, an increment of cost of a couple of thousand dollars onto the cost of a mortgage, within the first year the increased mortgage repayments were more than offset by the saving in utility payments, in electricity and water payments. In terms of the whole-of-life cycle, the cost of living was driven right down. We could not get intelligent engagement from the industry. I am very glad to see that there has been a change of leadership in some of the largest building companies in Western Australia. I believe that under this new leadership, particularly in companies like BGC, we would see a very different response now.

We are supporting this bill. There are some question marks for me around whether or not we should be allowing an exemption where there has been, supposedly, a non-solicited bid. I think there are potentially some problems around the enforcement of that, and that it has the capacity to be misused. I would like to see us go much further and ensure that we do this for residential building.

I will give an example of the appalling things that we see. As mayor of Vincent I was on various development assessment panels. We would have come before us rubbish developments that had absolutely zero cross-ventilation and in which some of the rooms were totally dependent on borrowed light. I would raise these concerns with the developer: 'This doesn't seem to me to be offering a very good product in terms of quality of life and affordability of operation.' They were small apartments aimed at the bottom end of the market. The developer would say, 'Don't worry about that. Don't worry about this cross-ventilation; we're putting in reverse-cycle air conditioning. They're not going to need it.' We are condoning bad design. Indeed, we are rewarding bad design. We are locking people into a lifetime of high energy costs and we are doing nothing to warn people about it. I think that is a national disgrace. We should have informed buyers. I reserve my particular contempt for Queensland, which did in fact have such measures in place. The measure was introduced in Queensland in 2010, and withdrawn in 2012 by the 'enlightened' Campbell Newman, who does not believe in the rule of law and does not believe in the science of climate change. He is a souped up, 21st-century version of Joh Bjelke-Petersen. That is a great tragedy for Queensland. I can assure members that I will be fighting to make this legislation even stronger under the Labor government which I am becoming increasingly more confident we will have in 2016.

The member for Forrest talked about business. There is so much business innovation coming out of the energy efficiency space, but we are putting the kibosh on it. There is a great new Western Australian firm, Ecocentric Energy. It is one of the firms that have not been closed down by a rampaging Department of Agriculture. This company has worked in collaboration with CSIRO and Commercialisation Australia, a project that is now being disbanded, just as Nobel Prize candidate scientists are being sacked, by this antiscience government. Ecocentric worked with Commercialisation Australia to develop a great diagnostic tool that can give very, very fine-grained reports on energy performance within a building or a manufacturing process. They have developed a thing called electrical fingerprinting and developed algorithms that are designed to recognise the energy signatures of each particular electrical device within the premises. It is a very sophisticated piece of kit. Not only did they get support under the Labor government from CSIRO, they were in the process of going to early commercialisation. We have scrapped the price on carbon and so now have no need for energy auditing. As a result, they are being wooed by the United Kingdom—I have seen submissions that have been sent to them by the UK trade office. The UK has said, 'Come over to the UK. We've got compulsory auditing provisions in the UK,'—they are also in operation in the US—'we will assist you in developing that technology.' Ecocentric are another example of the brain drain. This is happening around the world. We have shut down our carbon pricing architecture. We would have had the opportunity to be in there working with China, using the expertise we have developed over the last couple of years to work with China to develop the architecture that they are putting in place for their emissions trading scheme. We have lost that opportunity because we have destroyed the architecture. The member for Forrest went through and described a number of programs that Labor had done that perhaps had been less than optimum. There has been a lot of trial and error. I agree, we are in these new waters. There will have to be a lot of work done.

But I can tell you that the fundamental architecture that the Labor Party landed on and that was put in place within their second term of government is fundamentally the right architecture. We need a price on carbon. We need a decent renewable energy target and not a pretend renewable energy target; we need a decent renewable energy target that is going to drive investment into renewable energy. We needed ARENA, which was the early commercialisation phase, that allowed research and development and that early commercialisation to take place so that Australia could be a technology maker and not just a technology taker. We had the Clean Energy Finance Corporation.

Those four things together formed the essential and fundamental architecture that we need to address climate change and to ensure that Australia has a place in this new world of the 21st century. All of that is gone. It is all demolished. At this point, we are still working on the RET. Hopefully we will get one bit saved and hopefully Mr Palmer is able to continue to at least keep ARENA on life support.

But at the next election I have no doubt that this will be fought to a very large extent on climate change and Australian industry. The government of today will be found to be massively wanting on both of those counts. It is a disgrace that we are not acting seriously, we do not have at our core of this concern about climate change and we do not have at our core a concern about ensuring that we are part of the technology that is being developed. As I say, forget the green and red tape. You are wrapping us up in black tape.

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