Mark Butler (Port Adelaide, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Environment, Climate Change and Water) Share this | Hansard source

I rise on behalf of the opposition to indicate our support for this legislation, with one exception, relating to part 4 of the bill. But I do want to indicate our broad support for the Renewable Energy (Electricity) Amendment Bill 2015. The opposition does not do this with any particular sense of joy. We do it more with a sense of relief. In introducing this bill, and his second reading amendment, the minister indicated that the change, particularly to the Large-scale Renewable Energy Target, was, to use Minister Hunt's words, 'to better reflect market conditions'. We do not agree with that diagnosis. Instead, what this bill does is to pull an industry, a critical industry, back from the brink and put it back on a stable footing, not only in relation to the existing investments that do so much for our electricity sector and underpin so many jobs, but also to allow further investment to take place.

The government and the opposition need to do this because of a reckless and gratuitous attack that the Prime Minister launched on the renewable energy industry last year, adding this to a very long list of broken election promises. The election promise that the government made in relation to the Renewable Energy Target was not a vague promise. It was not off-the-cuff or ill considered. It was a promise that extended back many years—back to, in its second form at least, the renegotiation of the Renewable Energy Target between Minister Wong and then shadow minister MacFarlane, who is in the chamber and is now the Minister for Industry—

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