Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I appreciate the minister saying that they will judge the performance of this legislation on the basis of the number of companies that comply with the mandatory requirement to audit, but that is not the point I was making. I am expecting that they will all oblige and meet their mandatory obligation to audit the opportunities they have for energy efficiency. I think the minister well understands the point I was making, which was not whether they agree to do their audits and then do them but what government then expects them to do. You are putting a lot of faith in companies doing the right thing after they have done their audits.

I agree with you that if you are a company it makes sense to want to save money, and if you find a way of saving money it is not very sensible to think that you would not take that action. But the point is that companies have a number of competing objectives at various times and, unless you prioritise energy efficiency, they may well choose to spend any capital they have up front on other initiatives rather than investing in energy efficiency, even if there is a relatively short payback period. I do not think two years is excessive. That is the absolute easiest hurdle. It is not an unduly harsh measure to propose that they identify energy savings that will pay them back in two years. Then it can be taken out to four years over a period of time so they know what is coming.

I still have not heard the minister respond to the idea that, by failing to have a mandatory requirement for them to implement, you are not creating a level playing field. You are not offering an incentive to progressive companies who might wish to take that action but might see themselves as disadvantaged with respect to other companies who are not required to take that action and are able to spend their money on other things. That will slow it down. That is why I will be moving an amendment later in relation to a performance objective to force a requirement to look at this in a couple of years.

But again, it will be a lost opportunity. There is a lost opportunity factor. The minister talks about Australia’s compliance with Kyoto. Let us remind ourselves: the only reason Australia will come in—if it does—on our target of 108 per cent of 1990 levels is the windfall gain the Australian government was able to achieve by counting the avoided emissions from stopping land clearance. It is not because we have reduced our greenhouse gas emissions in either the transport or the energy sectors. If you take out the one-off windfall gain Australia got under the Kyoto arrangements as a result of its land clearance policy, you find that Australia’s emissions in the transport and energy sectors are well above—20 to 30 per cent—the Kyoto level.

Let us be realistic; let us not kid ourselves about Australia performing or outperforming other countries on the Kyoto targets. We got the most generous target in the world—an eight per cent increase on 1990 levels while other countries tried to set themselves reductions. Having got that generous target, we have had the windfall gain. You cannot have many more windfall gains unless you manipulate the system in order to generate credits from something else so you do not have to take any action.

I am talking about the transport and energy sectors and, in the case of this bill, the 250 large companies in particular. I am not persuaded about this, having looked at the aluminium sector, some of the other big industries around Australia in the last few years and the subsidies. They already get incredible subsidies for bulk power contracts. I have not seen them take energy efficiency initiatives so that when the bulk power contracts run out they can continue to compete. I am seeing them now mounting major pressure on governments to continue bulk power contracts rather than reduce their dependence on energy.

As to the state governments, you are absolutely right. It disgusted me to see the previous Carr government in New South Wales—I recognise that the former Premier has now left politics—set up a greenhouse gas office and approve a new coal fired power station and a desalination plant. It is the height of hypocrisy. It disgusts me. Then I look at South Australia and I see BHP Billiton’s planned Roxby Downs expansion. In order for that to happen, they want the government to build them a desalination plant so that they have the water to sustain the increased mining of uranium, to send that offshore. The whole thing is a disgrace. I do not see BHP Billiton—except in the headlines over the Wheat Board scandal of course, undermining appropriate processes and systems around the world—out there accepting the full-cost responsibility of anything they want to do. No; they have their hands out for the government and the government is rushing to help them, not only with a desalination plant but also to subsidise their expansion through the provision of energy to run their desalination plant.

It is time that people started to look at the whole cradle to grave aspect of production and energy costs, because energy is embedded in everything. I think we should recognise just how urgent the crisis is. We need action now. We cannot wait for companies to get around to it. That is why I do not accept the minister’s explanation about how you are going to judge the performance, the effectiveness, of this legislation. I will not be judging the effectiveness of this legislation on whether companies comply with the need to do an audit—I expect they will. But I want to know, in the absence of a mandatory requirement for them to implement the findings of these audits, at what point the government is going to say: ‘These 260 companies use X amount of power now. If they have not reduced that power consumption as a result of these audits within three years and by X amount then we will take some action to force the implementation.’ That is what I want to hear from the government. I cannot understand why you have an objection to moving on this now, especially when, as I have said, there is in my view a very generous two-year payback period. That is the concern I have.

As to the Labor Party’s opposition to the amendments, I am disappointed, because there has been quite a period since we last sat for the Labor Party to think about and look at these amendments. I did draw them to the attention of the shadow minister. There has been adequate time to look at them. It is another lost opportunity to move forward on this, especially when I recall that, Senator O’Brien, in relation to the Greens sun bill a few years ago it was the Labor Party that derailed that Senate committee report into the implementation of the Sun Fund. That was another attempt by the Greens to generate money to put into the development and roll-out of photovoltaics across rural Australia. That is something that I am still passionate about.

I am inspired by the German experience and by the visit to Australia this week of Dr Hermann Scheer, who has been the brains behind German energy efficiency and renewable energy legislation. He is here giving a seminar at this very time. I regret that I am unable to be at that seminar because I am here in the chamber. He has talked about the way in which in Germany they stimulated a revolution and created 160,000 jobs in renewable energy technology by moving to a relatively simple conceptual framework that said, ‘We will require power companies to buy renewable energy at a fixed price over a period of time.’ As a result, people could go to the bank and borrow to install renewable energy—photovoltaics, wind or whatever it is—because there was a guaranteed price over a period of time. As a result, Germany has created a solar revolution.

We could be doing the same in Australia. I am seriously disturbed by the fact that we have abandoned the whole renewable sector in favour of so-called clean coal and the fossil fuel industry. I certainly resent that going on at the moment and the shift in research priorities at the CSIRO. Even just lately we have had in South Australia a situation in which Tim Flannery has been virtually censored for saying that climate change is the greatest security threat facing humanity. The federation of commercial television stations said that they objected to that wording. How can we have a situation where people get censored for their opinions?

Sir David King, Tony Blair’s chief scientist in Britain, has come out and said exactly the same thing. People are saying it all over the world, but apparently in Australia we are not allowing people out there in the community to hear the message that this is urgent, this is serious. We are beyond voluntary action. If we do not act now we could have some major climate catastrophes. The science is showing that this will not be an incremental process; this will be a threshold process. The point is that we do not know when we will reach the threshold, but when we do there will be no going back. That is the frightening thing. Around the world we are seeing the acidification of the Southern Ocean, the slowing down of the great ocean conveyor and the melting of the ice caps. Surely in Australia we can require the 260 biggest energy users to do an audit of energy efficiency opportunities and to implement them if the payback period is less than two years.