Wayne Swan (Lilley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Since its election last year, this government has waged an ideological war on climate change. At every opportunity it has threatened any real action against climate change, so much so that we had the extraordinary statement from the Treasurer on Insiders last Sunday week that climate change was not an economic issue. Now we have a war against the renewable energy target and against the Clean Energy Finance Corporation. You cannot hope to be a first-class economy in the 21st century unless you are substantially powered by renewable energy—yet the coalition are waging an ideological war against the renewable energy target.

The RET commits Australian to producing 41,000 gigawatt hours of electricity through renewable energy sources by 2020. It was supposed to be a bipartisan commitment, going back to 2001—and certainly back to 2008. Now it is threatened. It was always set as an absolute amount for a very good reason: to give certainty to industry to make the investments. But the Treasurer hates even the sight of wind farms. He has a personal hatred of a part of the renewable energy sector and he is taking that out on the investors in renewable energy right across this country—because he cannot stand seeing the wind farms as he drives from the northern suburbs of Sydney to Canberra. He cannot stand looking at them, so we have to be rid of the renewable energy target. We have to target all the investors in renewable energy in this country because of the ideological sickness of this government, which does not even accept the very basics of the science of climate change.

That is even before you get to the war that has been waged on the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, an incredibly professional body which this government has done everything in its power to attack and to try to close down. It is now even trying to force a new mandate on that corporation to sabotage the very good work it is doing with investors right across this country. If there were ever an example of where the Liberals have demonstrated just how ignorant they are of the economics of this country—and most particularly the economics of climate change—it is in their ideological attack on climate change, their attack on the renewable energy target and their attack on the Clean Energy Finance Corporation. The RET and the CEFC are all about encouraging long-term investment in renewable energy so that in the 21st century we can be a country which is substantially driven by renewable energy, but the coalition are trying to get rid of them. They deny the science and they deny the importance of climate change to our economy, demonstrating yet again what economic Luddites they are.