Joanna Gash (Gilmore, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Last week I had the pleasure of touring the Woodlawn Bioreactor facility at Tarago, just a 1½-hour drive from Nowra or three-quarters of an hour from Canberra. It is operated by Veolia Environmental Services, which runs the Veolia Environmental Trust, a philanthropic interest that provides funding grants for projects that assist the environment. For instance, the Veolia Mulwaree Trust funded $5,883 towards a water tank and creating vegetable gardens at the Crookwell Preschool. They also contributed $17-odd thousand towards the cost of installing a new kitchen in the Breadalbane hall. I was delighted to learn that the Sussex Inlet Men's Shed, in my electorate of Gilmore, had also received a grant of $8½ thousand for a project to provide a loan pool of equipment to support cancer patients, and there was a contribution as well as to the Milton-Ulladulla Preschool.

There are copious other examples of Veolia's generosity but I would be safe in describing the organisation as a responsible corporate citizen. Veolia has over 30 years of industry experience in implementing effective, innovative and sustainable waste management and Woodlawn provides what I would describe as a contemporary role model for the industry—which is why I took along my staff, who could see firsthand, and gain an appreciation of, what an effective and comprehensive system the Woodlawn operation is. The Woodlawn Bioreactor and its support transfer infrastructure in Sydney is a $120 million investment developed to generate renewable electricity from general waste materials. The plant takes municipal waste from the Sydney metropolitan area and is the largest bioreactor landfill of its type in the world. The Woodlawn Bioreactor is differentiated from normal landfills by the investment in purpose-built infrastructure to break down the waste material rapidly and to enhance the collection of gas for production of power. The site has been visited by a number of eminent international experts in the field of organic conversion and has won a number of industry awards. To date the landfill has offset just under 200,000 tonnes CO2 equivalent, from the destruction of methane gas, which is equivalent to almost 50,000 cars being taken off Australia's roads.

Despite these real environmental wins, and the investment in the facility, Woodlawn will shortly have to address the requirements of the Carbon Price Mechanism, CPM, and all it entails. For the landfill sector, this scheme is an extremely clumsy mechanism—as the emissions for landfill occur into the future for up to 50 years in some cases—making the measurement of gas emissions difficult. Veolia and many other landfill owners have long been advocates for a direct action approach, such as provided under the Carbon Farming Initiative, that credits the environmental improvements achieved at each site in preference to the penalty approach adopted by the CPM. Unfortunately, with landfills being covered by the CPM, site operators will be exposed to the complexities of the modelling of these long-term emissions and the commercial risks that may result from modelling irregularities. With a carbon price of $30 tonne on waste received in the first year and current annual emissions of just under 150,000 tonnes per year, even a small error in modelling could have serious commercial consequences for some companies. The technical difficulty of measuring emissions is a stumbling block to a fair and equitable CPM for the landfill sector. This issue, and the uncertainty over carbon price into the future are likely to create a multitude of unintended consequences when it is rolled out next year.

The waste market is but two per cent of Australia's emissions, and yet the government has insisted on covering the waste sector under the CPM when coverage of all waste under the CFI would create the same abatement without any of the uncertainties created by modelling. It is somewhat premature to cover the sector under the CPM if one cannot measure what one is trying to tax. A company that has been doing the right thing for the environment, long before the idiocy of the carbon tax was dreamed up, is now going to be the victim of a double jeopardy. There is no relief for them because they are among the top 500 carbon dioxide emitters targeted. It is more than an irony; it is a travesty and the blame for this must be laid squarely at the feet of the Prime Minister, who promised there would be no carbon tax under the government she leads. You just cannot believe this government.