Andrew Broad (Mallee, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I wish to talk about the Renewable Energy (Electricity) Amendment Bill 2015, and reflect on the journey that has brought us to this point, and on the way forward. The journey so far was all about how we, as a nation, create a mechanism to encourage renewable energy in our midst. Renewable energy does inspire the hearts of people. As Australians, we aspire to have an energy mix made up of fossil fuels, but also, increasingly, of renewable energy in an affordable and sustainable fashion.

Not long ago, one of the prime ministers of Australia talked about climate change being the greatest moral challenge of our time. There were those who saw that as disingenuous. But in a big fever to move towards renewable energy, we realised what happens if you develop policy in isolation of industry or policy in isolation of the cost that it puts on people. In the great moral crisis of our time, we saw a carbon tax introduced into Australia. Effectively, what that did was take away what is our competitive advantage.

Our competitive advantage as a country has always been cheap electricity. We do not have the benefit of having cheap wages, or we might say we are the recipient of higher wages. That, of course, has created a standard of living that we, as Australians, enjoy. When people go to work they expect to be well paid, and they should be well paid. But what has helped us when we have produced goods is that our energy costs have been reasonably cheap. We compete with countries that have more expensive energy but have cheaper wages. But at least having cheap electricity has been our competitive advantage.

The challenge is that the carbon tax and then the Renewable Energy Target have actually put power prices up. The outworking of that is that we have seen industry shift offshore. Our government made a commitment that we would repeal the carbon tax. That is what we have done, and we are now moving forward on discussing how we ensure that we keep our competitive advantage as well as continue to encourage diversity in our energy generation mix.

One of the great testimonies of the Australian people has been the changed behaviour that we have seen within energy use. The projections of what amount of renewable energy we thought we would need have been put out and skewed simply because we have changed behaviour. I do not need to tell the schoolkids who are no doubt looking on up in the gallery that they now turn the light off instead of having lights just blazing away all day and that we now think about how we minimise our impact on the environment. I think that is something that we should be proud of as the Australian people, and some of the leadership of that has come from our younger Australians.

But in changing behaviour we have found that we have not needed as much generation capacity within our mix as we anticipated. The challenge we have at the moment is that we originally had a renewable energy target of 41,000 gigawatt hours, which was scoped to be quite a large percentage. But we did not need that much because we simply have changed behaviour. We have also moved some industry offshore. That changed behaviour has meant that we now need to make some changes and some adoptions to our renewable energy target. It is not to diminish the role of the target, but it does give an example of where we do not need as much in the mix as we originally thought. So this amendment bill is to move the target from 41,000 gigawatt hours to 33,000 gigawatt hours, still a very ambitious target to hit within the time frame and still very conscious of the government's role in creating a diversified energy mix.

The other thing that has happened is panels have got cheaper in solar and the technology has got better. I fear that as we have developed the renewable energy target over successive governments we have perhaps missed the opportunity to better enhance utilisation of our fossil fuels instead of demonising them. If we can burn coal hotter and create less emissions per unit of output of power, that is also a way of reducing our impact on the planet.

See this speech in context