David Gillespie (Lyne, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on this very important issue and to point out to the House that the coalition government has delivered in spades and we are not getting any credit. I will outline some of the things that we have done. We beat the Kyoto 1 emissions target by 128 million tonnes. We beat the second target by 249 million tonnes of reduction in CO2. On the Energy Security Board's figures—I haven't dreamt these up; this is the body responsible for guaranteeing our energy—we are going to increase wind and solar by 250 per cent by 2021. That's going from 17.5 terrawatt hours of renewable energy to 44.4 terrawatt hours of renewable energy. We are going to meet our Paris target of a 26 to 28 per cent reduction in CO2, which is below 2005 levels. We are going to reduce our intensity of CO2 per individual by 50 per cent. That is an incredible efficiency gain. The Clean Energy Finance Corporation has put $5.9 billion into investments, which has triggered $20 billion of investments in renewables. We are the No. 1 rooftop solar nation in the world. No-one has greater penetration of rooftop solar than Australia. We are kicking goals all over the place. We will get to 23½ per cent of our energy from renewables by 2020.

What do the people on the other side do? They dream up pink batts and 'cash for clunkers'. They want to shut down mining and forestry. They want to stop cattle farming and cut the ruminant herd. All they want to do is put us back in the Dark Ages. People have to realise that the modern industrial world relies on oodles of energy, a lot of it in the static built environment. People take for granted this magnificent building we're sitting in, the car you're driving in—the energy isn't in the petrol or the battery; it is in the actual building or the car. People focus on the last bit of energy that you used. The whole modern industrial world needs bucketloads of energy. Until the efficiency of solar and wind increases, 20 or 30 per cent of efficiency means you have to build five or three times the amount of nameplate capacity of solar and wind. Then you have to have a baseload power system behind it, because it runs only when the wind is blowing and the sun is shining. By its very nature it is incredibly inefficient. I'm all for promoting renewables, but they have to do it on their own steam. We can't keep subsidising them. If we give them a legislated guaranteed market—20 per cent or whatever target we set—that means, by law, the retailers have to buy from an intermittent energy producer, which destroys the efficiency of the baseload system. If they go down the track that they are promoting, we won't have a baseload system. Then we will be back to like we were in the 1950s and 1940s, when you had energy rationing and little towns had diesel generators, like they had to do in Tasmania. They talk about Tasmania being the battery for the nation, because they have so much hydro, but it didn't work when they had a drought and ran out of water.

There are a lot of practical things that they are not taking into account, but by the same token we are kicking goals. We have so much abatement going on. Our Emissions Reduction Fund has abated 190 million tonnes of CO2. The last couple of auctions were $12, $13 or $14 per tonne of CO2, as opposed to $150 for a carbon tax abatement. The Emissions Reduction Fund means farmers are doing things. Our forestry industry abatement from actively managed forestry estate, which is what we do in Australia, is 23 per cent more. People confuse forestry with deforestation. Australia has the best-managed forestry in the world, yet the other side is trying to shut down forestry. We provide black coal, which is much more efficient than brown coal, to other countries and to Asia. We provide steel, energy and liquid natural gas for the rest of the world. There are 25 million of us and we produce only 1.3 per cent of the world's CO2, but we are producing energy, steel, wood and other stuff for the rest of the world. (Time expired)

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