Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We're barely into spring and there are already bushfires in New South Wales on the eastern seaboard of Australia. Hurricane after hurricane has smashed into the US. Twelve hundred people have died in floods in Bangladesh. Climate change is happening and it stands to get worse unless we fix it. And what does this government do? This government comes in and says, 'We want to get rid of the Renewable Energy Target, which is driving down power prices and driving down pollution, and we want to replace it with a coal energy target,' because this government is under the thumb of the Trumps on the backbench who are in denial about climate change and who seem to be able to run the show.

Australia should be the renewable energy superpower of the world. Look around us. Look at the sun that falls on this country. Look at the wind that blows. Look at the waves that surround us. We should be the place that is exporting renewable energy to the rest of the world. We should be the country that business and industry comes to if they want cheap, clean and reliable energy. Other countries smelt aluminium using renewable energy. We could be powering energy intensive industry here from the sun and the wind and the waves if we had a government that wasn't under the thumb of the climate deniers and those who don't even believe climate change is real.

What has happened? Today, the Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, has given in to the first demands of the member for Warringah, former Prime Minister Tony Abbott. He said the Renewable Energy Target is no more. Even though it has led to unprecedented levels of investment in renewables in this country, the Renewable Energy Target is no more. So former Prime Minister Abbott gets his first tick. The Chief Scientist came along and said, 'Well, if you're not going to have a Renewable Energy Target what we ought to have in this country is a clean energy target. Put that in, and we'll meet our Paris emissions reduction commitments,' which are appallingly low, but he said we'll meet them. 'Let's do that.' And Mr Abbott stands up and says, 'No. We're not to have a Clean Energy Target in this country.' Today, the Prime Minister capitulates to him and says, 'Okay, former Prime Minister Abbott, we won't have a clean energy target, either,' even though people are lining up for it.

But what do we get instead? We get a promise that there is now going to be a requirement by law that we have a coal energy target. While the rest of the world is saying, 'How can we move as quickly as possible to renewables and replace our coal-fired power stations with renewables?' we've had today from the Prime Minister an announcement that Australia is going to join only the United States under Donald Trump and wind back support for renewable energy and instead put in place support for coal-fired power stations. There's now going to be a requirement in this country by law that there will be an obligation that coal and gas and other baseload power has to continue while the rest of the world is working out how we can have mechanisms to retire those sources and replace them with clean energy. As a result, every Australian, when they pay their energy bills, is going to have to stick their hand in their pocket and fork out a subsidy to a coal-fired power station so it can stay open longer while there's renewable sun, wind and solar lining up to take its place. No! The greatest brain wave now from the Prime Minister who is under the thumb of the Trumps on his backbench is that we, the Australian people, are going to have to pay to keep these coal-fired power stations open even longer. They then come up with a fig leaf and say, 'It's alright. It's not just a protection racket for coal. There's something else in here, as well. There's going to be a requirement that you have to have some low-emission sources.'

When you delve into the small amount of detail that there is, because this policy was dreamt up by a board that only had its first meeting two months ago—'Forget the year-long review of the Chief Scientist, we'll just handpick a new board and ask them to come up with a policy,' and then, bingo, it just happens to be the one that the Prime Minister wants—they say, 'It's alright. There's a low-emissions target in there, as well.' Delve into the detail of this policy that has been cooked up very, very quickly and you will find that, by 2030, we might get an extra five per cent of renewable energy over and above what the Renewable Energy Target would have delivered. While other countries are saying we could go to 50, 60, 70 or 80 and other people are saying we could get to 90 or 100 per cent renewables by 2030, this government is going to give us an extra five per cent. Well, thank you very much!

What's even worse, as you delve into the detail even further, is that a state government might say, 'Actually, we think that this new approach isn't going to meet our Paris commitments.' Because it certainly won't, and it's certainly not going to contribute to cutting pollution enough to keep us below two degrees. If a state government says, 'We want to do a bit more,' under this new approach the regulator says: 'Good on you. You do a bit more, and I'll take a bit off over here from the other state.' If one state wants to do more, it gets cancelled out by another state doing less. The pathetic national target that this government has put in gives us absolutely no hope of meeting our Paris commitments and meeting the two degrees target and ensuring a safe climate for our kids and grandkids. If a state government listens to the scientists and says, 'We've got to do a bit more,' Prime Minister Turnbull will come along and say: 'Thank you for doing the heavy lifting. Queensland can now do a bit less. Thank you very much, Victoria. I, as Prime Minister, will just sit back and put my feet up and do nothing at all.'

Renewables are bringing down power bills, and others are heeding the Greens call to start reregulating power prices in this country and stop treating electricity like a stock market and instead look at it as an essential service. But at the same time the government says: 'It's okay. You'll save a bit of money on this.' When one of the members of the Energy Security Board was pressed on this on television today, do you know what he said on how much you will save in 2020 when this comes in? He said you'll save 50c a week. Maybe it will go up to $2 by 2030, and who knows what power bills will be then under this government? For the sake of 50c a week, that may or may not materialise, we are selling out our children's future. We are signing people up to going to every Christmas holidays wondering when the next bushfire is going to hit or how many people are going to die in the heat waves.

It's worth remembering that the summer that accompanied the tragic Black Saturday bushfires in my home state of Victoria saw more people die from the heatwaves associated with it than from the bushfires. It is the old and the vulnerable who find themselves unable to deal with rising temperatures. If you live in one of the housing commission flats near my place, those concrete boxes heat up. With two days of 40 degrees in a row, they don't get under 30 degrees overnight, so families are bringing their kids down to sleep on the oval because it's too hot to go to sleep in their rooms. This government says they've given it a guarantee. The only guarantee from this government's announcement today is that climate change is going to get worse. The risk of more heatwaves and more bushfires and worse droughts and consigning our agricultural productivity to the dustbin—that is the guarantee from this government's policy. They have just signed up to say there is almost no chance of Australia doing its fair share to keep global warming below two degrees.

What could we do in this country if we had a government that had guts? We could legislate to bring in more renewables so that we can get our country running 100 per cent renewables by 2030. We could legislate a storage target to make sure that batteries and pumped hydro store the sun that shines during the day and the wind that blows overnight, so that it's available for you there the next day. We would have a plan to remove coal and support the workers in those coal-fired power station communities, so that as coal is phased out there are secure industries for them to go to.

I hear a lot of talk from the government about coal-fired power station communities. I have spent the year travelling around to them in Lithgow, Muswellbrook, Collie and the Latrobe Valley, to talk about why we need to transition beyond coal. If we start planning now, the power stations can close and they won't be left in the lurch like they were at Hazelwood. If we plan now we'll have new renewable energy jobs there for them to take up when the next power station shuts down. Or we'll support the new industries in the region that will come up to take its place.

There are a lot of things we used to do in this country. We used to mine asbestos until we worked out that wasn't a great idea. The government could have stood up and said, 'There are hundreds and thousands of people employed in the asbestos industry, how dare you want to shut it down?'

There comes a time when you realise that the science is clear, that coal kills and that, if we keep digging up coal and burning it at the current rate, we are going to kill people. We are killing people. We will kill people in heatwaves. We will kill people in floods. We will kill people from extreme weather events such as we have seen just in the last couple of months. They are going to come more and more often. A government with guts would phase out coal and increase renewables. (Time expired)