Greg Hunt (Flinders, Liberal Party, Minister for the Environment) Share this | Hansard source

May I start in an unusual place by congratulating the opposition spokesperson on his putative elevation to the presidency of the ALP. I have no doubt it will continue to consume much of its time, as it has of late, which may be why we have had only two questions on the environment in nearly two years from the entire ALP. Having said that, I want to make some brief opening points.

Firstly, on the meta picture of that which we inherited and on where we are heading with the priorities of the environment portfolio as demonstrated by this budget, we inherited a national budgetary position in a degree of significant chaos. We remember that the budget deficits bequeathed to this government were $27 billion, $54 billion, $47 billion, $43 billion, $18 billion and back up to $48 billion. Against that background of a catastrophic position, everybody has had to try to operate within the most efficient arrangements—within the most lean of possible structures—so as to ensure that we could spend money on action and would not have before us two things: a bloated bureaucracy or a large deficit. Against that background I am delighted that we have been able to achieve as significant an outcome as we have.

Of course, we inherited the problems of the Home Insulation Program, which still needed fixing. We have seen the catastrophe of the Green Loans program. We saw the aborted take-off of the citizens assembly and cash for clunkers, and of course we had to fix the impact of the carbon tax on so many businesses large and small and on 10 million households around the country. Against that background, to have an allocation of $1.965 billion in this year's budget and to have total available portfolio resources of approximately $2.4 billion over the forward estimates period is an outstanding outcome and achievement.

We look at this in four principal areas: clean air, clean land, clean water and heritage. Within the clean air space, obviously the most significant area is emissions reduction, and the first Emissions Reduction Fund auction has been held. It was a stunning success: 47 million tonnes of abatement contracted, 144 projects and a total allocation of $660 million in forward contracts. The areas in which abatement is to be found include waste landfill gas, reforestation, avoided deforestation, soil carbon, savanna burning, transport and methane from piggeries. That is an outstanding first round. In that first round alone we achieved four times the abatement of the entire carbon tax experiment at approximately one per cent of the cost per tonne of abatement--$13.95 per tonne as opposed to just over $1,300 per tonne of abatement, the real and genuine metric we should look at if we are trying to reduce emissions.

We are also achieving a national clean air agreement. We have in-principle agreement from all of the states and territories. Our objective has been 1 July 2016. I am hopeful that we can do it some considerable time before that. In terms of clean land, the Green Army has a $700 million allocation over the forward estimates in this budget. That is a considerable increase over last year's four years going forward. We set out to achieve 250 Green Army starts this financial year, and I can inform the House that we have in fact achieved 300 and those projects are going tremendously. The Threatened Species Commissioner will soon be joining with me in leading a national threatened species summit, and our focus is on turning around 20 significant species.

From there we move on to what we have done with the one-stop shop: $1 trillion cleared and agreements with all states and territories. In terms of clean water, we have had a tremendous outcome in protecting the reef. I hope to have an opportunity to speak on that more, but the reef outcome is tremendous. The Murray-Darling Basin agreement is making great progress. In heritage, of course, we are making huge strides with the acquisition of an Antarctic icebreaker.

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