Monique Ryan (Kooyong, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Net Zero Economy Authority Bill 2024 and the related bill.

The Net Zero Economy Authority will be a new statutory authority tasked with promoting an orderly and positive economic transformation as the world decarbonises. Ninety-seven per cent of the countries that we export to have already committed to net zero. The scale and the significance of this global transformation will be huge for a country like ours, which has relied for decades on emissions-intensive industries as the bedrock of our economic success. For Australia, the transition is a singular and extraordinary economic opportunity—a chance to lead the world in production of cheap, clean energy and to take back control of our mineral and rare-earth-dependent industries.

If we want that opportunity, if we recognise it for its unique circumstances, then we have to be prepared to invest in it. The establishment of this authority as the coordinating national body is a solid and welcome step. Unsurprisingly, the previous government lacked the vision for this commitment. The current government is acting appropriately, but it could go much further. The authority will coordinate the net zero transformation in three main ways: firstly, by facilitating achievement of Australia's greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets; secondly, by assisting our transformation to becoming a renewable energy superpower; and, thirdly, by supporting our Australian regions and workers through and beyond that economic transformation. Today I shall focus my remarks on the first two objectives of the authority.

Australia has committed internationally and domestically to lowering our greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050. Those international obligations arose when we signed the Paris agreement, along with over 150 other nations. As a nation, with the passage of the Climate Change Act in 2022 we further committed to reducing our greenhouse gas emissions to 43 per cent below 2005 levels and to net zero by 2050 in our domestic law. The effort and the commitment required for us to achieve these reductions is enormous. As the Minister for Climate Change and Energy has said, holding the world to 1.5 degrees of warming will be very, very difficult to achieve. And yet, in spite of that, this government recently announced its Future Gas Strategy, which includes the ramp-up of gas extraction and the use of gas until 2050 and beyond. The strategy proposes the use of gas as a 'transition' fuel because it displaces coal in the energy mix and because burning gas produces fewer emissions than coal. But the government's gas strategy goes much further than delineating a diminishing need for gas and a mature plan for the rollout of large-scale renewables over the next 10 to 15 years. It also includes the release of new offshore acreage for greenhouse gas storage and for new transboundary carbon capture and storage programs.

With this policy, the government has put us into a policy landscape of reverse thinking and backward logic. As my kids used to say, it feels like 'opposite' day. We can ramp up our gas exports at the cost of domestic power prices, and of local manufacturing, while we're claiming to decrease our carbon emissions. Yep—that's opposite day. We're still putting more than $14 billion a year into subsidising fossil fuel use and subsidies in this country. And in the recent budget, the government committed $566 million in funding for Geoscience Australia to conduct mapping of mineral and gas deposits across the country and its territorial waters. It will provide that data for free to gas companies, and yet the Prime Minister has claimed that no government money will be given to gas companies through the Future Gas Strategy. Yep—opposite day.

Australian industries used to enjoy abundant, cheap gas and that gave them a comparative advantage. But successive Australian governments have green-lit massive gas exports without instituting a domestic gas reservation policy, so we sell our gas cheaply overseas while we pay more for it here. It's multinationals, not Australians, who reap the superprofits from those gas exports. We pay too much for electricity and we're paying too much for our own gas after it gets processed overseas and shipped back home. We export 82 per cent of our gas, but this government's Future Gas Strategy says that we need to build new import terminals. It's opposite day.

Woodside's planned Burrup Hub expansion will be the largest fossil fuel development in the southern hemisphere. It alone would emit more greenhouse gas emissions than the output of all of Australia's existing coal-fired power stations. You don't increase emissions to decrease emissions. The same goes for carbon capture and storage. The success of this technology to date has been limited to its success in providing a convenient cover for fossil fuel industries. Take Chevron's recently approved Gorgon LNG stage 2 expansion. It will release three billion tonnes of carbon emissions over the next five decades. In contrast, its carbon capture and storage program has sequestered just over nine million tonnes to date and will capture only 100 million tonnes over the life of the system. The government has provided millions of dollars to provide regulatory and administrative certainty for offshore carbon capture and storage programs, but it says that it's not supporting gas developments. It's opposite day.

The second role of the Net Zero Economy Authority is to facilitate Australia's transformation as a renewable energy superpower. By putting billions of dollars towards critical minerals and green hydrogen in its Future Made in Australia strategy, the federal government shows that it is getting serious about a clean energy future. That is great. But I believe that it has missed a big, possibly the biggest, piece of the puzzle. Alongside critical minerals and green industry, the government must support home electrification via solar, home batteries and heat pumps. More domestic carbon emissions are created in our homes and from our cars—40 per cent in total—than from all of our businesses and their operations—30 per cent. Millions of households in this country have already saved on their power bills. They've cut emissions by electrifying parts of their home life. The electricity sector has achieved a 26 per cent drop in emissions in the last 15 years, while other sectors have remained largely static. Rooftop solar contributed 11 per cent of total supply in the national electricity market last year That is more than twice the electricity generated from gas. Those solar panels on our homes deliver electricity at a cost of three to six cents per kilowatt hour, a small fraction of the 30 cents per kilowatt hour that we pay when we get that electricity from the grid.

We have the world's cheapest renewable energy, and we could all share in lower electricity prices if the government 's approach to Australia's clean energy future expanded to include our homes and cars more aggressively. We should be taking full advantage of solar power by maximising rooftop panel installation and increasing storage capacity in homes, so-called behind-the-meter storage. We can do that via cheaper home batteries, heat pumps and in electric vehicles. Only 12 per cent of homes which installed solar last year installed a battery too. They're expensive. While I welcome the $27.7 million that was allocated in the budget to integrate rooftop solar and household batteries into the grid, this is only a tiny fraction of the $22.7 billion dollars allotted to Future Made in Australia in total.

Strong leadership is needed to give homeowners and small businesses support and certainty. The benefits are obvious. While the initial cost of purchasing solar panels, batteries and electric vehicles is high, they set those households up for a lifetime of savings: lower power bills as households generate their own electricity. This would be a much more durable and significant contribution than that $300 electricity bill rebate—less need for large-scale renewable generation, transition and storage, progress on which is much slower than the government would like. By 2050 the cumulative storage capacity in EVs in Australia will be four times the total energy storage requirement for the national electricity grid. By linking those EVs to the grid we could save the country tens of billions of dollars in infrastructure bills for batteries and other forms of large-scale energy storage. The government should help households stump up the capital that is required to help switch their appliances and vehicles, to help Australian households become domestic energy producers—a more reliable and resilient electricity network with distributed storage capacity and every suburb, ideally in every home.

For this to work, though, the government is going have to get the energy market governance right as well. Recently the biggest electricity distributor on the east coast, Ausgrid, announced plans to charge solar panel owners who export power to the grid during off-peak daytime hours. Other energy distribution businesses are considering similar pricing frameworks. These policies penalise householders and homeowners who have solar panels but have not been able to afford a home battery. The Australian Energy Regulator has said that our electricity network is not designed for large amounts of energy flowing back into the network. It should be. Ausgrid spends less than one per cent of its revenue on supporting rooftop solar. It and other electricity providers could do a whole lot more to ensure that the grid can accommodate 10 million electrified households.

We seriously and desperately need a review of energy market governance. It has to ensure that the appropriate technical standards are in place. It can be done, and it can be done relatively cheaply. These technical standards should be governed via a dedicated distributed energy resources authority—something like the Therapeutic Goods Administration and the way that it regulates medicines. I ask the government: aren't we better off giving low-cost loans or rebates on power bills to incentivise battery purchases or, even better, getting more Australians into EVs with bidirectional charging capacity than we are charging homeowners for putting electricity back into the grid?

Setting up the right regulations and governance structure will give confidence to the market that electrified households are central to Australia's net zero plan. Household electrification should be regarded as a national investment in important public infrastructure—as important as health or defence. This is something that the Net Zero Economy Authority needs to grapple with urgently. It should be part of our greenhouse gas emission reduction process and our transition to becoming a renewable green energy superpower.

Equity is important here. It's very important that every Australian household should have the same opportunity. It should be particularly important to the government that we make sure that these opportunities are available to renters, to people who live in smaller homes and to people who are otherwise economically disadvantaged. The government has to get the regulations right. It has to give households and small businesses help in their need to access cheap electricity. A battery here and a heat pump there might not sound as visionary as transforming big industry, but they could in the end be much more important in helping Australians make that net zero transition and in helping Australians reap the benefits of this new economy.

The cost of inaction is too great, both for the climate and for Australians struggling in a cost-of-living crisis. So I do hope that this authority can achieve its aims, and I'm very supportive of it, but at the moment it feels like, as a country, we're making lots of commitments and we're foreshadowing plans but without really firm timelines and without detailed commitments to change. As a country, we do know what we need to do, but we seem to be held back, whether that is by lack of vision or lack of commitment or by factional interests or debts to vested interests. We have a single shot at getting to net zero. We owe the next generation nothing less. We just need the political will and the courage to actually do that. I commend the bill to the House.

See this speech in context