Barry Haase (Kalgoorlie, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Roads and Transport) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Australian Centre for Renewable Energy Bill 2009. The purpose of this bill is to establish the Australian Centre for Renewable Energy, ACRE—that is, the board and the position of chief executive officer. ACRE is an initiative under the government’s Clean Energy Initiative, CEI, and will complement the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme and the expanded renewable energy target by supporting the research, development and demonstration of low-emission and renewable energy technologies.

The Clean Energy Initiative, announced in the 2009-10 budget, also includes the Carbon Capture and Storage Flagships Program, involving funding to support the construction and demonstration of large-scale integrated carbon capture and storage projects in Australia; the Solar Flagships Program, involving funding to support the construction and demonstration of large-scale solar power stations in Australia; and the Australian Solar Institute, which will support solar research and development and encourage collaboration between Australian researchers and with international solar researchers and institutes.

The previous coalition government made a substantial investment of more than $2 billion in renewable and clean energy sources, including the Low Emissions Technology Demonstration Fund of $500 million, of which $350 million was committed to projects; Australian Asia-Pacific projects, worth $100 million, with a further $50 million committed for 2007 and beyond; the Renewable Energy Development Initiative, which was $100 million; and the mandatory renewable energy target, or MRET, which stimulated $3.5 billion in renewable energy investment after its introduction in 2001. Domestic level support included a photovoltaic rebate program, worth $202 million; a solar hot water rebate, at $252.2 million; the Green Vouchers for Schools program, at $336.1 million; and Solar Cities, at $75 million.

The coalition’s commitment to renewables was further evidenced in our successful negotiations earlier this year on the renewable energy target. The coalition supports Australia’s transition to a lower emissions economy. But this transition must take place in a manner that does not jeopardise our energy security. Australia will need ongoing investment in alternative energy sources. We must consider, firstly, how to best make the transition to low emissions technology without risking jobs or investment and, secondly, what role Australia will play in the international supply of clean energy.

Debate in Australia has been about both of these issues but has been almost exclusively confined to the context of clean coal development. Sure, it is an important technology, not least of all because 37 per cent of the world’s power supply comes from coal. In Australia, 80 per cent of our energy comes from coal. The Rudd government must face up to the very real questions about how soon clean coal technology will be available for commercial use, what it will cost per megawatt hour and how much taxpayers will need to pay to subsidise the technology. Data released by the Rudd government’s own Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute shows that clean coal power stations are unlikely to be viable until at least 2030.

There is still no commercial scale clean coal power station anywhere in the world. Because we are the world’s largest exporter of coal, our future is undeniably bound up with the viability of the coal industry. We cannot sweep under the carpet legitimate questions about how Australia’s baseload energy requirements can be met at the same time as a reduction in emissions from coal. Australia’s rapidly expanding gas industry has the ability to provide cleaner energy, and renewables will deliver 20 per cent of Australia’s energy by 2020. However, to ensure Australia’s energy security, a comprehensive mix is required. Gas, geothermal, solar, wind and clean coal research all have a role to play.

We are not alone in facing the challenges of a transition to low emissions technology that does not compromise standards of living. But Australia is increasingly isolated in terms of the Rudd government’s blatant refusal to consider the possibility of nuclear energy. All but four of the other G20 member countries use nuclear energy. Sooner or later Australia must have an open-minded and full debate about the role of nuclear energy. It is a question that the community should have full ownership of, but it is one the Rudd government is determined to smother. Australia needs serious clean energy alternatives that can be delivered at an affordable price in the short, medium and long term. The establishment of a national body such as ACRE by this government could not come sooner for the energy and resources sectors and the science community—in fact, for all Australians wanting to support renewable energies in Australia. It is hoped that the Rudd government is capable of ensuring that ACRE achieves the objectives it is designed to accomplish, those being strategies to develop, commercialise and use renewable energy technologies.

Australia is home to one of the most diverse landscapes in the world, with each state responsible for exploring, researching and developing its own energy resources. These investments by each state in gathering information on renewable energy rightly ensure that residents and state businesses reap the benefits. However, this approach lessens the positive impact of information sharing between the states. The silos of information held within the states are traditionally guarded by the relevant agencies and the establishment of an umbrella authority, at least in theory, will ensure a cohesive arrangement of information sharing between the states. ACRE’s intention is to address this very real lack of national coordination amongst renewable energy technology programs, and it is strongly hoped that the government will ensure the integrity of ACRE is not compromised to the same degree as the government’s Energy Efficient Homes package. This scheme provided ceiling insulation worth up to $1,600, prior to its being wound back to $1,200, for Australian householders, including owner-occupiers, landlords and tenants of currently uninsulated homes or homes with very little ceiling insulation.

The Energy Efficient Homes package is currently the subject of a Senate inquiry. This inquiry is into, but not limited to, the rorting and abuse of the rebate; the waste, inefficiency and mismanagement within the program; what advice was provided to the government on safety matters, particularly in relation to fire and electrocution risks; and to what degree the government acted on this advice. By the way, submissions for this inquiry should be received by 18 December this year and the inquiry is due to report by 30 March 2010. One of the most blatant rorting scams to emerge under the Rudd government’s controversial pink batts program was when $1,600 was paid to insulate a house set for immediate demolition. After it had been insulated, the house was vacated to make way for a new bus way. Imagine the shock for the former owner when she received a letter from Peter Garrett’s department confirming it had just paid $1,600 to an installer to insulate the property. The house was demolished just a week after the insulation was claimed to have been installed in July. Reports of a couple receiving separate quotes—$300 and $1,600—for the same job is another example of the Rudd government’s mishandling of the Energy Efficient Homes package. Reputed to be a billion-dollar blow-out, this package reeks of waste and rorting.

Industry leaders warned earlier this year that inexperienced and ill-trained installers would put themselves and homeowners at risk of electrocution and fire with their shoddy work. With one installer electrocuted and numerous others receiving serious shocks, this advice, which was not acted upon, has come back to haunt the Labor government. Authorities have also issued warnings after dozens of house fires have been started by incorrectly installed ceiling insulation. In fact, fire and consumer bodies in five states have warned of fires caused by insulation placed over hot downlights or ceiling fans.

Upon the eventual admittance that there were huge problems associated with the installation, the Rudd government finally set up a program to randomly check the work of the insulation installers. The checking is done by people with little or no insulation installation experience who sit through an induction lasting 30 to 45 minutes before they are sent out with a ladder and a torch to check on the installers. So from beginning to end this whole insulation debacle has demonstrated why we are right to call a Senate inquiry into the government’s wasteful insulation program.

With mounting evidence of a lack of cohesion and harmony within the Rudd government towards their policies, it is imperative that the government listen to all stakeholders and not give free rein to themselves in an area that is as important as renewable energy. It is with pride that I acknowledge the ongoing contribution of Western Australia to this new and exciting chapter in Australia’s energy and resources sector, despite the many failed promises made to ordinary Western Australians by this government. In Western Australia, in which my electorate of Kalgoorlie encompasses the largest electoral landmass in Australia in addition to being one of the most resource-rich areas in Australia, there are currently five areas of major initiative being undertaken with regard to renewable energy projects. These areas of renewable energy are hydro, wind, biomass and solar energy—photovoltaic and solar thermal. In addition, wave energy technology is being tested with some degree of success.

We look forward in the very immediate future to huge increases in the demand for renewable power. We are greatly concerned about the issue of climate change or weather change. We are also concerned about energy security. Perhaps I should say we ought to be more concerned about energy security because, as we move to legislate to make the generation of coal fired power less palatable and more costly—and I remind you that 80 per cent of Australia’s power currently comes from coal power production—we need to be very careful indeed that ACRE does its jobs, and I will refer to one of the jobs that it might do, and do well, given its objectives. I remind you, Madam Deputy Speaker, of what ACRE’s objectives are, and I will quote them:

ACRE’s objectives will be to promote the development, commercialisation and deployment of renewable energy …

Specifically, amongst other things, it will do this by:

(c)

managing the cost effective delivery of Government funded renewable energy and enabling technology programs;

…            …            …

(e)

fostering collaboration between governments, industry and the research community on renewable energy projects;

…                     …                   …

(g)

any other activities that it is directed to do by the Government to support renewable energy and enabling technologies.

The elephant in the room undeniably in relation to greenhouse gas emissions reduction is the generation of electricity by the use of nuclear energy. The purists will argue that nuclear energy is not renewable energy because we only have a certain amount of uranium resources. But it is generally accepted at this point in time that Australia has some 40 per cent of the world’s known uranium resources, and it would seem fairly obvious to even a blind man that, given the richness of this resource within Australia, Australia—and especially this government—ought be at least considering, with all of the hullabaloo going on about reducing greenhouse gases, the use of nuclear energy. Many critics of nuclear energy—and I am talking about the informed critics of nuclear energy; I am not talking about those who remain with their head firmly in the sand—will suggest to you, quite rightly, that, with the competition of brown coal as a source of energy, nuclear energy is not financially viable, and I accept that.

But we are moving to an era where it is becoming more and more popular to embrace those energy sources that do not produce greenhouse gases. If we in this place could enlarge our minds for a moment, we need to consider another problem that this great nation of ours is facing: the issue of a shortage of water, and more specifically potable water. We have a major issue of wanting to avoid the generation of greenhouse gases. We have the major issue of guaranteeing water supply, specifically potable water supply. And we have the detractors suggesting we cannot have nuclear energy because we do not have the mass necessary to justify a plant of a size whereby there is economy of scale.

I put it to the House that in addition to those two problems, with nuclear energy we could solve a third one. Currently the largest of our cities, at certain times of the year, have to suffer the problem of smog and exhaust gas created hazardous atmospheres. If we were to locate somewhere within a coastal region of south-eastern Australia a very safe generation IV nuclear power plant, we could size that power plant to a point whereby excess energy, excess electricity created—not required by those populations within easy transmission reach—could be used to extract hydrogen from water. And with the development of the hydrogen fuel cell and the development of motor vehicles using that form of energy conversion, we could be running cities with hydrogen fuel cell driven vehicles that would generate no pollution whatsoever. The only conversion that takes place is that oxygen is taken from the atmosphere and electricity and water are produced. We could perhaps either keep the water onboard to water the garden when we get home, or we could dampen down the streets for dust suppression. But it is a very simple solution. That is just one part of a possible justification of building nuclear power plants to a critical mass size. Perhaps I should not use ‘critical mass’ in the same speech that is talking about the use of nuclear energy.

The problem with potable water supply and the recognition today that desalinated water is going to be our saviour in the future for cities’ potable water supply, that is what a generation IV nuclear power plant can do most efficiently—that is, to take seawater or saline water and produce potable water. Given that we are looking at population increases, given that we are looking at the change in the weather and the fact that we want to guarantee our water supply, including potable water supply, and given we want to clean up the atmosphere in cities, I suggest to this place that the great solution as we move into the future contemplating many forms of non-polluting energy sources, including renewable energy sources—if we are fair dinkum in this place about coming up with solutions and enabling technology to occur for the benefit of this nation and for the benefit of the people who live in this nation—then we must consider nuclear energy, nuclear power generation as a justifiable addition to the mix.

To that end, the coalition supports this bill’s recognition of and intent to address the lack of coordination within governments with regard to renewable energy technology programs which have evolved over a number of years. With the current government’s dismal track record, it is imperative that the ACRE’s aspirations are not jeopardised so as to ensure that Australia’s energy future features a mix of technologies to guarantee we can make the transition to a lower emissions economy without compromising our energy security.

Kelvin Thomson (Wills, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The purpose of the Australian Centre for Renewable Energy Bill 2009 is to establish the Australian Centre for Renewable Energy and the position of chief executive officer. ACRE is an initiative under the Clean Energy Initiative. It will complement the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme and the expanded renewable energy target by supporting the research, development and demonstration of low emission and renewable energy technologies.

It is very timely that we have a debate about renewable energy today. Whatever the political pressures we are under concerning a move away from carbon based energy, and no doubt they are significant, we have a duty to take a science based, evidence based approach. I note that Senator Nick Minchin recently said on Four Corners that climate change:

For the extreme left … provides the opportunity to do what they’ve always wanted to do, to sort of de-industrialise the western world. You know the collapse of communism was a disaster for the left, and the, and really they embraced environmentalism as their new religion.

Let me observe that I do not hear anyone proposing that we de-industrialise the Western world, and I hope that Senator Minchin looks closely at this bill when it gets to the Senate. Proposals to move to solar, wind and geothermal energy, or for greater energy efficiency or for electric cars, do not represent an atom of deindustrialisation. Proposals for solar panels and rainwater tanks promote the kind of household self-reliance one would expect a champion of rugged individualism to be enthusiastic about. More worrying, it suggests that Senator Minchin is so stuck in the Cold War battles of the past, locked in time with the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago, that he is going to see this issue through ideological blinkers rather than look at the science, look at the evidence, look at the facts. Apparently he would rather see his own city of Adelaide sizzle and burn than admit that the Left might be right about this issue.

Contrary to the propaganda of commentators like Senator Minchin, most people who seek to protect the environment do not want to lower their standard of living; what they seek to do is to put their lifestyle on a sustainable basis. It is true that some aspects of our lifestyle have become extravagant and excessive and that there is plenty of scope to reduce our consumption of electricity, water and vehicle fuels. But our need for electricity, for water and for cars is not going to go away, and it does not need to. What is needed is to generate that electricity, deliver that water and power our vehicles from energy sources in a way that does not trash the planet. That is why we need to move to renewable energy and that is why we need this bill.

It is said that renewable energy is not capable of meeting Australia’s baseline power needs. This is quite misleading, on three counts. First, much of the increase in power use, and therefore the increase in carbon emissions, arises at peak periods—for example, the use of air-conditioners on hot summer days. This is precisely the time at which solar power works best. Renewable energy which meets peak demand is extremely important in meeting our future energy needs. Secondly, while any given renewable energy source may be intermittent, the fact is there are many different energy sources located across many different areas of Australia. In combination, they are capable of meeting large chunks of Australia’s power needs in a predictable, reliable way. The existence of the national electricity grid facilitates this. Thirdly, it is not a matter of all or nothing. For example, wind power can operate in concert with gas fired power stations to produce power with much fewer carbon emissions than our present coal fired arrangements.

People who claim that renewable energy can only operate at the fringe of electricity generation are quite wrong. Professor Ian Lowe has pointed out that renewables now account for a quarter of the installed energy capacity of California, half of Norway’s and three-quarters of Iceland’s. Grid connected solar energy is growing at 60 per cent per annum worldwide and renewable energy industries now employ nearly two million people. These are examples of just some of the renewable technologies which are presently being applied.

Solar thermal power plants generate electricity using heat. Much like a magnifying glass, reflectors focus sunlight onto a fluid filled vessel, generating heat that drives a turbine to produce electricity. The United States and Spain are developing this technology—ironically, originally conceived in the early 1990s at the University of Sydney—with plans for over 5½ thousand megawatts of new capacity to come online by 2012. The output from these plants would be enough to power one-quarter of Australian homes. Solar photovoltaics, solar PVs, use semiconductors to convert sunlight energy into direct current electricity. Excess energy is stored in batteries for later use. It can also be fed back into the electricity grid. Australia receives enough solar energy in one day to supply half a plant’s annual energy use, but countries like Germany and Japan are way ahead of us in using this technology. There is solar hot water, which is mandatory in Israel. There is wind power. Wind turbines convert the kinetic energy in wind into mechanical energy.

The Texas state government is driving an effort to build 23,000 megawatts of wind-generating capacity, the equivalent of 23 coal fired power plants—enough to meet the residential needs of half of Texas’s population. It would take 4,200 wind turbines to meet all of South Australia’s energy needs. Denmark, which is two-thirds the size of Tasmania, has already installed 5,000 turbines. Then there is bioenergy generated from organic matter. This is suitable for electricity, heating and transportation. It is important to note that growing crops for bioenergy purposes should not compromise global food production or degrade native forests. Unfortunately, there is evidence of this occurring in emerging countries such as Brazil and Indonesia.

I want to say a little bit more this evening about geothermal energy. It does not get discussed much in the parliament, but it is potentially the largest source of energy in the world today. Unlike solar energy, which comes to the earth from the sun, geothermal energy comes from deep within the planet itself. Like solar energy and wind power, geothermal energy could, if properly developed, match all of the energy available from coal, oil and gas combined. Indeed, the amount of geothermal energy potentially available is, according to the United States Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu, effectively unlimited. And Al Gore’s most recent book says that the amount of geothermal power available is so frequently underestimated primarily because its use as a source of electricity has long been associated with the few locations where hot water bubbles or spouts to the surface. In fact, the global geothermal resource base of stored thermal energy is very large. According to the United Nations world energy assessment report, the geothermal resource is roughly 280,000 times the annual consumption of primary energy in the world. Moreover, geothermal power has numerous advantages over any other form of energy. Unlike coal, oil and gas geothermal energy has virtually no CO2 emissions. Geothermal plants are modular and scalable. They have the smallest environmental footprint on the surface.

Like solar power, geothermal resources are available virtually everywhere on earth. It is underneath developing countries as well as wealthier countries. It is not intermittent. Once it is in place it provides power 24 hours a day. There are two kinds of geological areas where geothermal resources have traditionally been most easily located. The parts of the earth where the temperature beneath the surface gets hottest are usually located at the boundaries where tectonic plates come together and where active volcanoes are often found. There is a new and growing excitement about geothermal electricity, based on new technologies, that makes it possible to exploit sites deep in the earth that have enormous amounts of heat but lack one or more of the characteristics found in hydrothermal reservoirs. For example, many of these sites do not have water. Capturing the energy from these new non-hydrothermal resources has led to new approaches. This new technology for making geothermal power is called ‘enhanced’ or ‘engineered’ geothermal systems.

By using new technology that exploits the advances in drilling and reservoir stimulation—developed in part as a result of the frenzy of oil and gas exploration in the 20th century to create active reservoirs that emulate the properties of hydrothermal systems—geologists and engineers believe that they have found ways to produce extremely large sources of geothermal power from regions several miles deep in the crust of the earth. The geothermal resources worldwide are usually associated with volcanic activity, but we also have geothermal resources in Australia associated with heat-producing granites. Development work is underway in the Eromanga Basin in South Australia and Queensland as well as in the Hunter Valley in New South Wales. The potential geothermal resource is estimated at 450 times Australia’s total energy needs. Geothermal energy could directly replace coal fired power, as it provides a constant power source.

I think that this parliament and this country need to put a greater investment of energy and effort into exploiting this great potential resource. The fact is that Australia has a lot of potential—a lot of unrealised potential—in relation to renewable energy. Australia currently sources just eight per cent of its electricity from renewable energy, down from 10 per cent in 1997. Australian electricity consumption has increased more rapidly than renewable electricity supply. This compares very unfavourably with Germany, which has 25 times more wind energy installed than Australia. Even though their wind sites are less windy than Australia’s worst commercial sites, they have six times more wind energy per person than Australia. Japan and Germany each have 24 times more solar-electric panels installed than Australia despite having significantly poorer solar resources. At the end of 2005 both of those countries had 1,400 megawatts, compared to Australia’s 60 megawatts.

So, although Australia has unrivalled solar, wind and geothermal resources and led the world in the development of solar technology, we have not been using these natural advantages in the way that we should. We have had companies move overseas for want of market support. In a 2006 review of international markets’ attractiveness to renewable energy investors, Australia ranked 16th—that is, fourth from the bottom. This is unfortunate. Globally, there is a lot of investment in renewable energy. In 2005, worldwide investment in new renewable energy was worth US$38 billion. In 2005, grid connected solar-PV power grew by 55 per cent and wind power grew by 24 per cent.

I also believe we need to look at vehicles. In June this year we saw General Motors in America go into bankruptcy. This company basically failed to see where petrol prices were going and failed to see where consumers were going. Our car manufacturers need to think seriously about manufacturing cars that run only on electricity. China, Israel and Denmark are doing this. There are companies that have produced a business plan involving the construction of car battery recharging stations at parking spaces and billing motorists online for the electricity they use. Fully charged cars would be able to travel around 160 kilometres, and for longer trips motorists would pull into stations resembling car washes and exchange their spent batteries for new ones.

The Silicon Valley based company Better Place has raised hundreds of millions of dollars and entered into agreements with Israel, Denmark, a number of governments in the United States, Renault and Nissan. Under the Better Place model, consumers can either buy or lease an electric car from the French auto maker Renault or the Japanese car maker Nissan and then purchase miles on their electric car battery in the same way people purchase mobile phone time from a mobile phone carrier. The cars are sold at a relatively low price and owners are charged operating fees. The total cost of owning an electric car, including the upfront prices and ongoing operating expenses, is expected to be less than for a conventional car.

China is seeking to become the leading producer of hybrid and all-electric cars within three years. It is behind the United States, Japan and other countries when it comes to making gas-powered vehicles, but it is skipping the current technology and hoping to get a jump on the next one. Of course, electric cars that use electricity from traditional sources produce carbon, but, if we move to renewable energy such as solar, wind, geothermal and other carbon-free methods of producing electricity, we could obviously get around this problem. That would give drivers freedom from petrol price fluctuations, and Australia would get a sustainable future for our car industry, an improved trade balance and energy independence.

Finally, I want to note that it is not just about renewable energy, it is also about energy efficiency. It is important that we have a balanced approach to this issue. I commend to the parliament the formation of the Australian Alliance to Save Energy, which intends to raise the profile of Australia’s opportunities in energy efficiency in a concerted and sustained way. Its operating model is drawn directly from the Alliance to Save Energy, headquartered in Washington, DC, and it has had senior representatives from Washington advising it during its formation phase. The Alliance to Save Energy has been at the centre of energy policy debates in the United States for over 30 years and has helped design, implement and evaluate a range of domestic and international demand-side programs and distributed-energy programs.

The government has been very active on the renewable energy front. We have had the initiatives in the 2009-10 budget, including a $4.5 billion clean energy initiative. We have had the renewable energy target legislation, which we debated and passed earlier this year. And, finally, we now have the establishment of the Australian Centre for Renewable Energy. I commend the government on its renewable energy initiatives and I commend the bill to the House.

Bob Katter (Kennedy, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I have never seen a debate where there is so much hot air and so little science. I do not know why people do not actually sit down with scientists and go over this in detail. Madam Deputy Speaker, imagine that four of my Akubra hats are up on the ceiling and that the ceiling above us is a giant fluorescent light. Would those four Akubra hats stop this room from being illuminated? Clearly, they are going to have virtually no effect at all. But that is what you are saying. You are saying that 400 parts per million of carbon is going to reflect light back to earth. Let us have a look at the science of this. You have CO2 molecules floating around and you have photons—light—going upwards from the earth. The photons from the sun’s rays rebound and go back up again, and they hit the CO2 molecules.

A tiny bit of that energy is absorbed by the molecule, but basically the photon is deflected. It continues on to outer space. If you throw a rock at a boulder that is poking up, the rock will continue to go forward unless you actually hit the boulder right in the centre—otherwise, it will continue its forward momentum. It will not come back down to earth; it will continue in forward momentum. You do not have to be a scientist to work all of this out.

I am not a global warming sceptic; I am a global warming anti, as I have said on many occasions in this place. If you do not like that position, then for heaven’s sake argue the science of it in this place. This is where it needs to be argued. Having said that, we have a dramatic increase, and that is occurring at an increasing rate. We have an exponential growth here in the problem. So, whilst there is no global warming now—and I could not really see a serious problem arising for another century or two centuries, as far as global warming goes; and it is not the case in the oceans—if you increase the CO2 level of the atmosphere, you will increase the CO2 level in the oceans by exactly the same rate.

I scouted around and found out that Dr Katrina Fabricius at the Institute of Marine Science is one of the world’s renowned scientists in this field. I was told she is one of the top scientists in the world in this field—she is a very self-deprecating person and she denied that, but I think it may be true. We know the pH levels in the earth are seven—seven is neutral. Seawater is 8.1. It has a logarithmic change. A change of only 0.1 of a pH unit will result in a 30 per cent increase in hydrogen ions. They are ionic and I think they would be referred to as free radicals. Whilst I do not want to get too carried away with the science, if you have CO2 plus H2O you end up with H plus ions plus HCO3, moving on to CO3, CO2 minus, plus 2H plus.

What that means to a layman like me is that at this pH level there is a decreased number of CO3 ions because they have now become HCO3. No CO3 is available to form calcium carbonate. Calcium carbonate comes from the shell of shellfish. A vast area of all ocean biodiversity is in fact shellfish. The food supply chain has at its very basis biovalves, if you like, which are shellfish. They cannot be seen by the naked eye. We can dig up eugaries under the bridge, but biovalves are very small particles—the same sort of thing but infinitely smaller. I asked: has any hard research been done? Dr Fabricius said yes. She pulled out a study, which I refer to the House: ‘Marine biocalcifiers exhibit mixed response to CO2 induced ocean acidification’. Justin Ries, Anne Cohen and Daniel McCorkle are the authors of the paper. It was in Geology, in December 2009. It is a very honest document in so far as five of the sea life that have been analysed do not show any negative response as a result of increasing carbon dioxide in the seawater, but, of the 18, the rest of them do. There is a very serious change in calcium carbonate growth as a result of the increasing carbon dioxide in the ocean.

What all that means is that we do have a problem that we may have to look at seriously in the immediate future. I think that every member of parliament in this place—even a person who may be described as being at one extreme of the debate—would say, and even I would say, that we need to take a bit of a pull on the reins. How would you do that? I had the privilege of being the mines and energy minister in the Queensland government. No greenie am I—I can assure you. I am just the opposite of a greenie and my government was an anti-greens government. We resolved to go to solar hot water systems in all of the government houses in Queensland. If we did that, over the next 10 years—and I think it was more likely to be over the next six or seven years—we would not have to build a 1,000-megawatt power station, which was about one-fifth of our generating capacity in Queensland at that stage. So what I was doing was saving the taxpayers of Queensland $1,000 million.

You might well ask: ‘Hold on a minute. You’ve got the cost of the solar hot water systems.’ They were government houses. If you added the rent and the electricity charges together, we would increase the rent to pay for the solar hot water system and of course the electricity costs would come down. The net result would be a reduction in the cost to the householder. This may sound like magic but it was no magic. We were a very hard-nosed government that could add up—almost all of us were people from private business; some of us made a lot of money and some of us had lost a lot of money as well as having made a lot of money. We knew what it was like to make an economic decision. The economic decision was taken that we would move to solar hot water systems. Very regretfully, we lost government the next year and the scheme was abandoned by the incoming Labor government—the people who come in here and preach to us about how we should be saving the planet! A CSIRO gentleman—I think it was Dr Sacher; I may stand corrected on that—got a lot of publicity for saying that the government proposal will not work. The government proposal being put up here simply will not work. It will not work because you cannot avoid being honest at some stage in government.

The government is being honest and says it will have to let them plant trees. I for one am desperately opposed to massive monoculture. On the scale that we are talking about here, literally millions of hectares would be required. That is what is going to happen. Madam Deputy Speaker Saffin, your area and my area are suffering as a result of tree plantations. We are losing jobs left, right and centre because of the managed investment schemes which the last government failed to control and the current government is failing to control. An awful lot of these investors are simply looking for a way not to meet their tax burden and they are putting their money into trees. To give you some idea of what is going to happen, thousands of acres were wiped out in Ingham in the last flood. People do not understand that trees take a hell of a lot of looking after. The environments in which they are being planted, where you can have millions of hectares, are not naturally kind to trees. Trees will grow there but at a very, very restricted rate of growth, unless you can apply some irrigation to them. We planted a million trees in the most wonderful tree-friendly regime in the world in Far North Queensland during the Greening Australia campaign and I am reliably informed that only 28,000 of those trees are left.

What will happen here is that you will see the Macquarie Banks and the Goldman Sachs and all of those people growing wealthy through buying and selling securities out there, because the new security will be the carbon credits that you will buy and sell. They will be a tradeable commodity worth thousands of millions of dollars, and these people will get hundreds of millions of dollars, if not thousands of millions of dollars, for trading these securities backwards and forwards. If there is something that we are absolutely notorious for in this country, it is gambling. It comes from the fact that almost all of our forebears who were here before the Second World War and all the miners before the Boer War came out during the gold rushes. There is no doubt that built into our culture is a bit of a gambling culture. If you put thousands of millions of dollars worth of securities out there, all we are going to be doing once again in Australia is playing russian roulette with securities. We are going to plant a whole stack of trees that simply will not be there in 30 or 40 years time. We will have wasted all of this time, money and effort and we will not have reduced the CO2.

The CSIRO officers—I must praise them very highly but I do not want to embarrass them by mentioning their names—believe most profoundly that their own government is on the wrong track here. They believe that the government should be taking positive action to reduce the CO2, not relying upon the marketplace. Surely in this country we have woken up to the fact that marketism is dead—and it has almost killed Australia with it. There is no doubt about that. Manufacturing has gone and agriculture in this country is two-thirds gone. There is nothing left except the mining regime, which is now going to be destroyed by having to carry a burden and a handicap that no-one else on earth has to carry. It is going to be 25 per cent of the cost of mining. I rang three of the biggest mines in Australia to confirm this figure: 25 per cent of the cost of mining is in electricity. There seems very little doubt, and no-one is denying, that the cost of electricity is going to go through the roof when this occurs.

Let us look at the options. I refer to Professor Szokolay’s book The Solar Home. It is a book that is highly respected throughout the world. It is on the reading list of many universities around the world but particularly in the United States. The book says that 40 per cent of domestic energy consumption is in the heating of water. So we could reduce by 20 or 30 per cent domestic consumption in one hit. Madam Deputy Speaker, your area and my area are quite capable of producing 20 per cent, maybe 30 per cent, of Australia’s petrol needs. I hold up to you, as I have done many times in this House, the government’s own graph of oil production and the graph shows that up until almost 2002 we were self-sufficient in oil. As the Minister for Resources and Energy, Martin Ferguson, has pointed out in this place on numerous occasions, that graph rapidly divides now and by 2014 Australia will have only one-third of its oil requirements met by its own indigenous reserves.

Surely we are going to do something about a situation which will cause another massive blowout in the current account and make us totally dependent upon Indonesia and the Middle East for our source of oil. That can transform itself immediately into 60 per cent indigenous if we move to ethanol. We highly praise the New South Wales government for the initiatives they are taking. I am deeply depressed to tell you that no such initiatives are coming out of Queensland. There is a lot of hot air and rhetoric—they have been promising it now for about 11 years—but nothing has transpired. On the other side of the document I am holding here, as I have held up on many occasions in this House, is a picture of a very handsome fellow in a big white Akubra hat in Sao Paulo in Brazil filling up his Holden motor car at 74c a litre. The price in Australia at the same time was 124c a litre. Unfortunately, I lost the picture of me filling up a motor car in Minnesota for 84c a litre. The United States and Brazil have ethanol; this country does not. Why doesn’t it? Because the government listens to the big corporations. The political parties are in the hands of the big corporations. That is the only reason this country, which is so suited to ethanol, has not gone there.

If we switch to an ethanol regime, no less a person than Al Gore—the greenies patron saint—nominates on I think page 136 of An Inconvenient Truth the first solution as corn ethanol. Corn ethanol is only one-third the value—it is only 29 per cent—and is only one-third as good as sugar ethanol, which is available in the electorates of the honourable member for Richmond, who has just stood down from the chair, the member for Dawson and the member for Leichhardt and my electorate. We can do it tomorrow if we get the cooperation of the government. But the government is spending $120 million on building a solar energy research centre in Canberra. What in heaven’s name? The last place on earth I would put a solar energy research centre is in Canberra. I have not got time, unfortunately, to outline to the House just what dumbness has come out of this place, but let me just give you one example.

Debate interrupted.