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

The minister, interestingly, made the comment that someone must pay. Indeed, someone must pay. In his analysis he was talking about the cost of renewable energy and what that did to electricity prices. I think we should be looking at who, in fact, will be paying if we do not move towards renewable energy and if we do not move towards the reduction of emissions. The minister seems to be living in some sort of fool's paradise where he believes we can continue coal-fired power generation without there being a cost to the community. The cost might not be appearing immediately on your power bills, but it is a cost that is going to accrue to this community over the coming generations.

We are already seeing how these costs are playing out with climate change. We are already seeing this very real problem in the north of Australia where increasing weather volatility is leading to a massive increase in insurance payments—a massive increase in insurance payments that far exceeds the increase in energy costs that comes from having a renewable energy industry. Indeed, we all know that we have to go through this period where we do support renewable energy technology to ensure that we give it an ability to reach a stage of development where it can be competitive in its own right. When we talk about who is going to pay, we must look at the price being paid by our community—both economically and in terms of health—from climate change, and recognise that we need to make this strategic investment now so that we will have a source of energy that will enable us to deal with climate change and, in the long run, bring the cost of energy down. It is very much a question of making a strategic investment now.

The quite extraordinary thing is that countries around the world are recognising this as an investment that must be made. When we look at the United States, their last federal budget alone had $1.9 billion injected into the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy to support new projects, to engage in the development, research and early commercialisation of renewable energy and energy efficiency projects. What have we done here in Australia to ARENA—the equivalent organisation? ARENA is an excellent organisation with a fantastic remit to take everything through from pure research to early commercialisation and to providing actual implementation funding. We have seen $434 million pulled out of its budget over the next 10 years. Indeed, had the government had their way, ARENA would have disappeared altogether. But, fortunately, through the work of the Senate, we were able to see that ARENA has been kept on life support. This year it will have a very modest $89 million to invest in renewable energy projects. These are very important for us to ensure that we have an industry.

The fundamental philosophical problem of this government is that it thinks that somehow or other you can create those 21st century industries without there being active engagement of government and that all you have to do is create a small government and a small business environment and somehow or other we are going to see the florescence of all these new technologies. As I say, you can see from the investment in research and in early commercialisation that is going on in countries around the world, including in countries like the United States, that they understand that this is not true. It is not true in any of the 21st century industries and it is certainly not true in the renewable energy space.

We need this architecture. The renewable energy target is part of a composite architecture that was put in place that included a price on carbon and the establishment of the Australian Renewable Energy Agency and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, which was able to move in where venture capital was, at this particular point of time, too reluctant to go. We need that whole suite of projects, that suite of climate change infrastructure, in order for us to remain competitive.

The minister made an extraordinary statement. He said that when they came into government the RET was on the rocks. No; when they came into government they cut down the lighthouse, threw a hand grenade into the renewable energy target and commissioned a well-known climate sceptic to undertake the review of the RET. Even without their ability to change the legislation, even though the legislation remained in place, setting the large-scale renewable energy target at 41,000 kilowatt hours, they were, nevertheless, able to completely and utterly undermine the renewable energy target by creating this climate of uncertainty. We saw, since the announcement that they were beginning this review, with Mr Warburton in charge, until now, where we have finally landed on a compromise arrangement, that renewable energy investment fell 90 per cent in this country. So we saw a 90 per cent fall in renewable energy investment.

Global investment in renewable energy projects during the same period last year was $270.2 billion, and that is excluding large hydroelectric projects. That is 17 per cent higher than the previous year. For solar alone, it was $149 billion. Those are extraordinary figures. If we go to China, the figure was $83 billion, up 39 per cent; in Japan it was $35 million; and in India it was $7 billion. We understand that even Saudi Arabia is now making a big push into the renewable energy space.

It is not as though we had ever been arguing that we should not be doing something that all other countries around the world are doing, but, for some reason or other, there is a view in the government that we can just contract, we can cut down all of the architecture in place and somehow or other this industry will survive; or, I suspect, more importantly, they do not care whether this industry survives. Indeed, they have probably been the beneficiaries of considerable largess from the fossil fuel companies and they are quite happy with the fact that we have seen a resurgence in brown coal use. Just as everyone around the world is trying to wean themselves off it, we are happy, apparently, in Australia to—as Colin Barnett has done in Western Australia—reopen Australia's dirtiest coal fired power station and to see a renaissance in brown coal being used for electricity generation in Victoria. It is an extraordinary set of circumstances, and the government would think that this is an acceptable outcome and that this is the type of outcome that we wanted.

We strongly supported the work that our shadow minister did in negotiating this compromise. It is absolutely critical that we preserve what we can of the complex architecture that we put in place to deal with climate change; it is absolutely critical that we get renewable energy investment back on track. It is certainly quite clear, as the shadow minister has said, given that they have been cutting down the lighthouse and creating enormous instability and loss of investment over the last 18 months, that it is now going to be virtually impossible to get to 41,000 gigawatt hours. Again, that is not because it was an unreasonable target in the first instance but because they have come in and sabotaged the investment that would have allowed us to achieve that.

We have been prepared to work with the government to come up with a compromise on this—not one that we are entirely happy with, but we take responsibility for ensuring that we need to put this industry back together and we need to get those investments flowing. Certainly, from talking to the renewable energy companies in Western Australia, they have been very keen for us to reach this compromise—companies like WestGen, who have a whole raft of relatively small-scale projects, such as 10-megawatt style projects—so that these projects in the pipeline can get underway, once the uncertainty that has been created by the government has been dealt with.

The long-term job opportunities are there. In Western Australia, we have the prospect of a new vanadium mine. This is a very high-quality, high-grade vanadium mine just south of Meekatharra. That project has an inferred resource of 125 million tonnes of very high-grade vanadium. Vanadium has extraordinary possibilities for renewable energy storage. The vanadium redox battery, which is a very high-density storage battery, is being developed through the University of New South Wales. It gives us the opportunity to be world beaters in this energy storage space, which is so important for the sustainability of renewable energy. We are hoping that, with this Yellow Rock Resources vanadium mine, we can build on that and develop the battery production within Western Australia. We have to think about this. This is a 21st century industry. This is a sunrise industry and we must do all that we can to ensure that we have the strategic investment in Australia, in Western Australia, that is going to ensure that we are technology makers, not just technology takers. The prospect of developing this high-grade vanadium mine in Meekatharra, with a battery storage production facility, is extraordinarily exciting.

Again, we must think. If we are just focusing on the immediate electricity price, we are losing the battle. We must be creating those opportunities for the 21st century. We have to be up there, matching what is happening in the United States, China and India, and providing that capacity for our renewable energy industry to develop, prosper and be competitive in the world.

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