Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Product Emissions Standards Bill 2017 and the related bills currently before the House. This package of bills is long overdue, and I do commend the stakeholders and members of the manufacturing industry, in particular, who've worked long and hard to finally get some emissions standards for small engines in this country. Australia is one of the last major economies to regulate the toxic emissions from lawnmowers, leaf blowers, chainsaws and the like.

Although this government is finally doing something about these emissions, a far greater source of toxic emissions continues. Coal-fired power stations are a far greater source of toxic air pollution—including mercury, sulphur and oxides of nitrogen—and yet the government shows no interest at all on acting on this pollution. This government are tough on lawnmowers and leaf blowers, tough on lawnmowers and the causes of lawnmowers, but they let dirty, polluting coal off scot-free. I'll have more to say about coal-fired power stations and their pollution a bit later, but first I want to comment briefly on the bills before us.

The Product Emissions Standards Bill establishes a national framework to enable Australia to address the adverse impacts of air pollution from certain products on human and environmental health. It implements a key aspect of the National Clean Air Agreement established by Australia's environment ministers on 15 December 2015. Under that agreement, an initial action was the introduction of national emissions standards for new non-road spark ignition engines and equipment. The explanatory memorandum to the bill states:

… consistent with the National Clean Air Agreement, it is anticipated that the first emissions-controlled products to be prescribed under the … framework will be NRSIEE products—

non-road spark ignition engines and equipment products. It goes on:

… rules made for NRSIEE will prescribe two broad 17 categories … new small non-road spark ignition engines (up to 19 kilowatts in power) and new marine spark ignition propulsion engines.

In other words, these rules will cover outdoor power equipment, such as leaf blowers, lawnmowers, chainsaws and brush cutters, as well as marine engines, such as outboards and personal watercraft. Emissions from these products include nitrogen oxides, hydrocarbons, carbon monoxides and particulate matter. But these bills do not regulate carbon dioxide and other global-warming gases. At peak times, these non-road engines and equipment are estimated to contribute up to 10 per cent of overall air pollutants in Australian urban environments. The government claims that this bill will align Australia with other developed countries and major markets that already have similar standards, including the US, Japan and China, and the EU, and that Australian standards will be harmonised to minimise any regulatory burden.

The bill also allows the minister to prescribe products as 'emissions-controlled products' and to make rules relating to those products. It establishes offences and civil penalty provisions relating to the import or supply of certain controlled products, and it also enables the sharing of information with other agencies and the publication of certain information relating to these emissions-controlled products.

The Australian Greens have long called for controls on air pollution, and in 2013 we initiated a far-reaching inquiry in the Senate into the impacts on health of the air quality in Australia. Because we have been the ones leading the charge in the parliament on regulation on this front for many, many years, we support this bill and we will vote for it. But we do share some of the specific concerns expressed by stakeholders that the bill falls well short of what is needed.

As I said at the outset, the bill does not address the main source of air pollution in Australia. For example, the bill fails to make it an offence to modify a machine in any way that changes its certified level of emissions. There is no point in having clean-certified engines imported if there are no restrictions on modifications. It's been reported to my office that at least one existing manufacturer makes modifications to every Honda engine it uses in its Australian manufactured products. So, once it's imported, what then happens to it is completely unregulated. The current automobile standards have a modification restriction, so why not small-scale engines? Why not?

Secondly, it is important to understand that the bill's not just about lawnmowers and outboard motors. It creates a framework that will be used in the future for a range of products, so it's important to get it right. Stakeholders have legitimate concerns about the enforcement of these rules. With 1.3 million small engines imported yearly, enforcing these restrictions on importation is going to be a critical means of ensuring compliance.

But concerns have been raised with me and with my office that the exemptions contained in the bill may be far too lax. It's also been suggested that the department's plan is to allow any products sold in limited numbers under the USA scheme to be sold in unlimited numbers in Australia. Essentially, that gives us the USA 2006 standard, which is not exactly world's best practice. It's also been claimed that abandoning evaporative standards means that we're going to remain behind world's best.

I welcome the minister's response on these concerns, because these may well be issues that we pursue as this bill progresses through the parliament. However, as I've indicated, we do support the bill, because after many years of delay it represents some action—some action—on air quality and tackling toxic pollution. So it's a good step but a very tiny step.

As I said at the beginning—this is part of the reason that it doesn't go anywhere near far enough—the pollution controlled by this bill almost pales into insignificance compared to the massive amount of toxic pollution from Australia's coal-fired power stations and our vehicles. Even the government has agreed that fine particle pollution emissions account for the lion's share of impacts of air pollution. We, the Greens, will continue to pursue the case for a phase-out of coal-fired power stations in this country and a shift over to renewables because of the climate change impact.

But let's just park that for one moment and focus on what this bill purports to regulate and to be concerned with, which is the direct health impacts of particulates and of pollution. We know, as I've said, that as much as 90 per cent of the health impacts across the country are related to fine particulates, and yet small engines are not even listed as a source of PM2.5 in the National Pollutant Inventory. Lawnmowers are listed as a source of nitrous oxide but in 14th place. A total of 390,000 kilograms is regulated by this bill, compared to 360 million kilograms from power stations and 340 million kilograms from motor vehicles. We have to bear in mind that the government is still dragging its heels on vehicle emission standards, where we are way behind the standards set in the US and Europe.

The clear hypocrisy of this government has now been revealed by a major new report released by Environmental Justice Australia just two weeks ago, which shows that Australia's power stations are allowed to emit far more pollution than those in the US and Europe and that many operators are failing to adopt available pollution reduction technologies and in one case even admitted to falsifying pollution reports. That report states that nearly 900,000 Australians in Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria live dangerously close to coal-fired power stations that cause asthma and respiratory illnesses and increase the likelihood of stroke and heart attack. Those 900,000 living in close proximity to the power stations are not the only ones who are affected. Emissions from the five New South Wales power stations account for 87 per cent of Sydney's sulphur dioxide pollution. This report, entitled Toxic and terminal: how the regulation of coal-fired power stations fails Australian communities, is the result of exhaustive research, freedom of information searches, surveillance of Australia's major power stations and advice from health experts and industry whistleblowers. I want to commend the work of Environmental Justice Australia in putting it together.

The report comes up with some incredibly startling findings. They find that coal-fired power stations emit more than 30 toxic substances and are Australia's biggest source of PM2.5, or fine particle sulphur dioxide and oxides of nitrogen, and that these substances cause and contribute to asthma, lung cancer, heart attacks, stroke, respiratory disease, headaches and nausea in nearby communities.

The report also finds that, incredibly, in most cases emission limits from these stations in Australia are much more lax than those in the US, the EU and China. In many cases, Australian coal-fired power stations are allowed to be more polluting with the kinds of chemicals that are regulated by this bill than those in China. Mercury limits in some New South Wales power stations are 666 times higher than the United States limits. The report also found that pollution reduction technologies that have been available for many, many years and are used overseas could significantly reduce power stations' emissions but aren't in use in Australia.

It was also found in the report that a representative of the Yallourn Power Station admitted 'that at times of excessive pollution it "simplified" its reporting by stating that it was emitting at levels that correspond with its licence limits'. Shockingly, and this comes back to the question of enforcement, it found:

Despite much evidence of failure to comply with pollution licence conditions, no power station in Victoria, NSW or Queensland has been prosecuted for any offence in the past ten years (instead they have been issued with inadequate penalty notices).

One of the report's co-authors, Environmental Justice Australia's lawyer, Nicola Rivers, said, when releasing the report:

Fine particle pollution exposure is responsible for 1,590 premature deaths each year in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth … People who live within 50 kilometres of coal-fired power stations are three to four times more likely to die prematurely than people who live further away.

And, because air pollution travels:

… 87% of the sulphur dioxide pollution recorded in Sydney can be traced to have come from power stations in the Hunter Valley, more than 100 kilometres away.

She also said:

Power station pollution is believed to cause 130 premature deaths a year in Sydney.

That report highlights the lack of seriousness of this government in tackling air pollution. It's all well and good to be tough on lawnmowers and leaf blowers but coal-fired power stations are allowed to emit more pollution than in China. Whatever you think about climate change, whatever you think about the current debate about the role of coal-fired power stations, when you know—it's undeniable—that coal-fired power stations produce pollution and the kind of particulates that the government says that it cares about and when there are 1,590 people dying early in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth because we do not properly regulate pollution that comes from our power stations, which we allow to be more polluting than China, then you would think you'd take action on it. If you're prepared to have reviews over several years, go through COAG and talk about how you're going to crack down on lawnmowers and leaf blowers then don't turn a blind eye to the massive power stations that are sitting, in many cases, in people's backyards and are causing people who live within 50 kilometres of them to die and suffer disease more than others in the population. Don't allow these power stations to continue to produce so much sulphur that it travels all the way down to Sydney and accounts for 87 per cent of Sydney's air pollution. Do something about that as well.

Instead, what we know in this country is that the coal-fired power station lobby has this government under its thumb; when it says 'jump', this government says, 'How high?' We know the government doesn't care about climate change. But, again, let's put that to one side. If this government actually cared about people's health and wanted to stop 1,590 premature deaths in some of those eastern seaboard cities every year, then what they would do is say, 'We're going to go beyond leaf blowers and lawn mowers and we're going to tackle one of the biggest sources of preventable pollution in this country and look at what's coming out of the top of those stacks at our coal-fired power stations'. Maybe if the government had the guts to regulate the pollution that comes out of there—to at least the level of, say, China, but, ideally, to the level they're using in the EU—we might go some way to having clean air in this country and stopping people from dying unnecessarily.

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