Jim Chalmers (Rankin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

Think about this stunning fact: more energy from the sun hits the earth in one hour than all the energy consumed on our planet in a year. You do not need to be Einstein—even the member for Mayo would grasp this—to see the opportunities in all of this for Australia, given our abundance of sun and wind in this country. We have all the ingredients to be a world leader in renewable energy—except a government that treats it as a priority.

My support for renewable energy extends to the programs that help make it a reality in this country: the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, the carbon price and the renewable energy target. We want an economy powered by clean energy, we want cheaper energy for middle-Australia in the medium term, and we need some business and investor certainty in this country. That is why I support almost all of the RET bill that is before the House of House of Representatives tonight.

Just like other speakers, I am proud of Labor's record when it comes to renewable energy. It is a fact that we were a world leader, during the Rudd and Gillard years, on renewable energy. We were in the top four for renewable energy investment alongside the powerhouses of Germany, the United States and China. That is an incredible feat for a nation like ours. I can rattle off lots of facts to demonstrate just how important investment in renewable energy was during that period. Solar rooftops grew from 7,000 homes at the beginning of the Rudd-Gillard years to 1.2 million homes. Wind power tripled. There was $18 billion of investment in wind and solar farms, hydro plants and renewable energy development.

One of the things I was most proud of is that there was a tripling of jobs in the renewable energy sector, despite a global financial crisis. Carbon pollution from the electricity sector dropped. In the last full year of Labor it dropped seven per cent from June 2012 to June 2013. You can see how this was achieved when you contemplate this, taking my own electorate of Rankin, to the south of Brisbane, as an example: 30,000 families in Rankin invested in solar energy for their homes. That is 42 per cent of the families in my community. That is much higher than the national average of 22 per cent, higher even than the Queensland average of 32 per cent. It is much higher than the Prime Minister's electorate of Warringah, which had 5.9 per cent take-up, or the Treasurer's electorate of North Sydney, which had 4.2 per cent.

You can see that communities like mine took up the opportunities of renewable energy with gusto. It shows this is not a preoccupation of the inner cities. It is something done by people of modest means, in suburbs like mine. They can spot an opportunity to do the right thing for the future of the economy, the country and the environment at the same time as they make a real investment in cheap, alternative energy for their families.

The contrast is really clear when you consider the achievements of the Labor government that I just ran through and compare them with what has happened since the election. It is a fact that the change of government had a devastating impact on investment in renewable energy in Australia. We went from being fourth in the world in terms of investment—remember, it was Australia, Germany, the US and China in the top four—and we are now 10th. The government should be acutely embarrassed of that fact. They shattered the bipartisan consensus over the renewable energy target, despite promising not to. They did not just try to trash our legislation in 2010, but they trashed the Howard legacy of the Howard legislation from 2001. They had a hand-picked panel that they tasked with undermining the renewable energy target. They headed it up with a guy who, remarkably, is the Prime Minister's business adviser, who thinks that the climate change debate is a cunning plan for world government. This was all part of their grand strategy to smash the RET, to smash the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, to smash ARENA and all the other institutions, policies and initiatives that helped make Australia one of the top four countries for renewable energy investment in the world, as it was under Labor.

They are supposed to be the party of business and investment, and in the process they smashed investor confidence. They brought investment to a standstill. If you consider this one fact: in 2014, worldwide investment in renewable energy went up 16 per cent; in Australia, in the same period in the large-scale sector, it was down 90 per cent—not 19 per cent, 90 per cent. It was up, around the world, by 16 per cent; it was down by 90 per cent in Australia in one year—and they have the gall to pretend that they are pro certainty, or pro investment, or pro business.

We entered into this negotiation because we value certainty for the sector. We wanted to restore confidence, even if we could not have absolutely everything that we wanted when it came to the renegotiation of the renewable energy target. I want to pay tribute to the member for Port Adelaide for his role in these negotiations, working with the government to get the best deal that we could for the renewable energy sector. We worked with the industry, and we worked with the stakeholders, to make sure that we could get for them, and the broader Australian community, the best possible deal. We reached agreement for about 25 per cent of energy from renewable sources by 2020. Even at 33,000 gigawatt hours, this will drive, with the certainty it brings, something like $40.4 billion in investment, and create more than 15,000 jobs. When you consider that the unemployment rate is higher now than at any point during the global financial crisis, those 15,000 jobs are very valuable indeed.

We worked with the government, but we did stand firm on some issues, including no change to the small-scale solar scheme for rooftop solar, including small businesses and other institutions—for example, nursing homes. We fought for a full exemption for emissions-intensive trade-exposed sectors and companies to protect jobs, and we fought against the two-year review so that businesses have the certainty they need. The two-year review that was thrown on the table late in the piece would have gone against everything we were trying to achieve when it came to certainty in the sector.

As other speakers have said, we do not support the inclusion of native wood waste biomass, for the reasons that the member for Port Adelaide ran through in detail. It was not in there when we were in government, as the member for Isaacs would know, having been a key contributor to our policy in this space, and it should not be in the agreement now. Our position will have absolutely no detrimental impact on investor confidence in this country.

We want an economy powered by clean energy. We want investor certainty. We want more people in communities like mine to access cheap renewable energy, and we want to help create the jobs of the future. That is why we need to be ambitious when it comes to renewable energy, and especially the renewable energy target. We have done a deal here in the interests of investor certainty, and we look forward to building on it and building on the substantial achievements of the Labor Party in renewable energy in the years ahead.

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