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

I rise to speak on Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2014-2015. I want to talk tonight about the budget in the context of the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, and what perhaps might be seen as some dishonesty in the budget in dealing with ARENA. I also want to talk more generally about the work that is being done with ARENA and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, and how this government is fortunately being stymied in their attempts to destroy these very important institutions which are driving forward Australia's efforts in renewable energy and our capacity to participate in this very important 21st century industry.

It is incredible to note just how ARENA has been able to hang in there despite being under the Damoclean sword of the Abbott government. It is very interesting that the budget papers tell us that the government is going to save $1.3 billion over five years from 2017-18 by abolishing the Australian Renewable Energy Agency. However, as we know, they have not been able to convince the wise people in the Senate of the merit of this, so we have the ARENA surviving—and not only surviving. The legislation, the ARENA act, which was enacted as part of an arrangement made with the crossbenches, incorporates ARENA's entitlements for the five-year period that the budget claims it is making savings on. We have a piece of legislation which has enshrined in its text the fact that this agency is entitled and capable of spending over $1.3 billion, and yet the government is claiming in its budget that it is making savings of that sum.

We have had the budget. We then had the failure to be able to execute ARENA—and then we had MYEFO. But it is interesting that in MYEFO there is absolutely no mention of the fact that this $1.3 billion worth of savings has been unable to be delivered because of the legislated protection for ARENA. It calls into question the very basis and credibility of this budget. If such a very obvious saving has not been able to be delivered, because it has been subsequently enshrined in legislation that it will be forthcoming, how is it we can have the budget review process completely ignoring that fact? Yet this is what we have had.

I note in MYEFO there is a table on climate spending. It is acknowledged in the text accompanying the table that there has been an increase in climate spending, but not because of the ARENA. The ARENA expenditure is not mentioned and presumably was not taken into account. Again, the failure of the government to be able to deliver on another one of its destructive promises—that is, the dismantlement of the Clean Energy Finance Corporation—has budget consequences. There has been the acknowledgement that they have had to increase their climate spending because of that. I also want to acknowledge, on a positive note, that there is also an increase in that expenditure over the forward estimates because of the $200 million that was committed to the UN Green Climate Fund.

We know that the Prime Minister was not keen on this particular project and that he tried to stop the Minister for Foreign Affairs from attending the Lima conference. When she insisted that she attend, he sent the trade minister in to ride shotgun to ensure that she did not make any embarrassing statements that would have suggested that Australia was indeed part of the 21st century modern world. It appears that the Minister for Foreign Affairs has been able to extract a modest sum, which has contributed to that fund. We must acknowledge and celebrate when there is something good happening in this space because, by and large, what is happening or what the government is hoping to happen is very, very destructive.

Why anyone would celebrate wanting to destroy the Australian Renewable Energy Agency is beyond me. This agency, chaired by Greg Bourne, a very esteemed Australian, has been doing truly extraordinary work. At the moment it has over 200 projects on the go. Of those, 33 have been completed. The really interesting thing about ARENA is that it is a very flexible organisation. It can fund projects that are at one end pure research, and that probably constitutes a relatively small proportion of its funding, through to providing assistance for early commercialisation—what is generally described as the valley of death—right up to providing financing for generally smaller projects that are fully fledged and commercially ready to go. ARENA leverages an enormous amount of private sector funding in that process. It requires that all recipients have to be prepared to share the knowledge, so that all of the learnings that come from proceeding with a project which ARENA assists in is then fed back into the universities, the businesses and the industry generally to increase and enhance the intellectual property across the board and enhance the understandings of the commercial realities.

Some fantastic projects are being delivered. One that I have been involved in for a long time—and it is great to see that the first phase of this project has been completed—is the CETO Wave Energy project. This is a $32 million project which has delivered a Western Australian, an Australian and a world first—that is, it is the first wave power plant that is feeding energy into a grid. So on Garden Island we have a plant that is creating energy from wave power and that is being fed into the grid, and it has a power procurement program with the Department of Defence.

I first came across this project in around 2005 in its very early days, and it is fantastic to see it having come from that very early stage—building up from the demonstration level through the various phases of the project—to now, where it is actually out there and producing substantial quantities of power going into the south-west interconnected grid. That was given $13 million worth of assistance from ARENA. I think the price at the moment is coming in at around 25c per kilowatt hour. With the next phase of the project—when they go to the next stage of this technology—they believe they will be able to bring the price down very, very considerably, to a point where it is getting somewhere near commercial parity. But it is not going to happen if we do not provide that assistance.

Providing this early assistance and getting these projects off the ground enables us to keep ahead of the bell curve in terms of invention and development and commercialisation of the creativity. Unless we have agencies like ARENA—smart agencies seriously being able to assess, mentor and guide these projects and get them off the ground—we are going to be left being technology takers and not technology makers and we will lose any competitive advantage that we have been able to build up by being involved in this process early on. That would be a very, very great tragedy. Despite the government's best endeavours to kill off this very excellent organisation, it has managed to stay there battling on and being able to fund these projects.

Another very exciting project is the Supercritical solar project, which provides very temperature combined with high pressure solar functionality. There are other projects that get water up to the 520 degrees Celsius that we see in this supercritical, but the point here is that this is the first project that, at the same time, is able to get the very high pressures coinciding with that. That is a new frontier for power generation. It is really taking solar power into the next generation. To quote the CSIRO's energy director, Alex Wonhas:

It's like breaking the sound barrier; this step change proves solar has the potential to compete with the peak performance capabilities of fossil fuel sources.

I just wish that this stuff was more generally known. We had the member for Page here earlier talking about how renewable energy is nice, but it is never, ever going to be able to do the job of fossil fuels; it is never going to be able to have that calorific value, that power, that you get with fossil fuels. What we see in the work being done through our own agencies, through the CSIRO, the University of Newcastle and ably assisted by ARENA, is that we are rapidly getting to that point. Why would we not want our society, our community and our industry to be there at the forefront of this new generation of technology? Why would we want to try to dismantle the agency that is kicking such tremendous goals across the whole spectrum of renewable energy projects?

The budget papers show the government claiming that it is going to save $1.3 billion from axing this incredible agency. I am pleased to say that they cannot do that. These provisions, these allocations, have been included in the ARENA Act and the board and the organisation are working to that act. I want to place on record my admiration of Greg Bourne and the agency and the tremendous work that they are doing.

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