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

I regret that the government has not even had the courtesy to indicate why it intends to vote against this reference. I regard this as a strategically critical issue for Australia. Those senators who have been aware of my involvement in putting the oil inquiry to the Senate and getting the government to agree to it and then in the conduct of that inquiry will know that the inquiry has been extremely strategic in what it is doing. It attracted more than 150 submissions. Out of that inquiry we will start to get some real understanding of Australia’s future oil supply needs. Even today we have had figures come out that show the appalling shift in Australia’s importing of oil and our failure to have a strategy to move rapidly toward the reduction in transport fuels, the reduction of imported oils and the expansion of biofuels, alternative energies and so on.

My thinking here is not party political; it is strategic. I am trying to say that we have to stop ad hoc policies and we have to start having integrated policies that look at an industry policy, an employment policy, an energy policy and an environment policy that come together. Climate change is the most critical security issue. It is the biggest threat to our way of life. I said on budget night that the government has completely missed the main game in refusing to address either climate change or oil depletion in its budget. They are the two biggest issues facing Australia, and the government completely avoided them—they were not even noted in the budget. It is interesting that the budget has disappeared without a trace and the issues that are on the agenda right now are energy and oil. Pick up any newspaper, and you will see issues of energy security, climate change, sustainable energy sources into the future, oil depletion and associated costs, city planning, congestion and the need for investment in public transport.

We are getting a knee-jerk reaction to all of those issues. This country needs to ask itself this fundamental question: what does Australia consider to be dangerous, anthropogenic climate change? That is first question this country has to answer. If the answer to that is 1½ or two degrees, which is what the scientists are telling us that we are facing, then we have to put in place the strategies that not only reduce greenhouse gas emissions but, hopefully, generate jobs and a better quality of life for people in Australia. That requires extensive planning and thinking about the way our cities operate. It requires moving people onto public transport. It requires energy efficiency targets. We need to improve people’s health through increased access to bicycle ways, walkways et cetera in cities. We need all of those kinds of things.

We also need to look at the fact that we are losing jobs overseas. We have had Roaring 40s say that they are going to have to invest in China and other overseas places. Why? Because China has a 15 per cent renewable energy target and Australia does not have one. Roaring 40s have gone to China and will do no further development in Australia. Let me take another example: Novera Energy, which does waste to energy and landfill gas, moved to the UK. Seapower Pacific, which was looking at tidal power, has gone overseas. Let me give you another example: Dr Shi, Australia’s solar billionaire, is investing in China and making money and jobs in China, not in Australia.

Then we go to ANU sliver cell technology. They have a technology that reduces the cost of solar by 75 per cent. That is a mega breakthrough. We should be commercialising that and running it out all over Australia. We do not need nuclear power. The point of setting up a committee with these terms of reference was to look at sustainable and secure energy supplies. There is nothing more sustainable than the sun. It is the sustainable energy supply for this planet, and Australia is blessed with the nature of its solar resource. We have a secure and sustainable energy option for this country if we were to go with renewables, but we need a much more comprehensive energy policy.

Senator O’Brien said a moment ago that Labor would not tolerate energy intensive industries being driven offshore to places with lower standards. What he may not realise is that there are very few places with lower standards. We are getting to the point of having some of the lowest standards in the world. China, for example, has now set fuel efficiency standards for its vehicles that Australian cars would not meet. So it is no use signing an Australia-China trade agreement and expecting that we might be able to export cars to China because our fuel efficiency standards are not as high as theirs. They are moving rapidly, as are most other countries in the world. What we have to do is set high standards and expect our industries to meet them.

That is why I have moved this motion. We need to not only require Australia’s energy intensive industries to have a mandatory audit of energy efficiency opportunities but require them to implement the findings of that audit provided there is a payback period of one to two years. That is not very great—that is a very easy step for them to take. I put that point of view with regard to accelerated depreciation.

That is why I am saying that there needs to be an integrated industry, energy, employment and environment strategy. We need to look at all those things and ask: what is the energy mix that will be sustainable into the longer term, that will give us energy security, that will create the most jobs in Australia and that will be ecologically sustainable? If you ask those questions, you will start to get a reasonable mix. By setting higher standards, you get innovation and technology improvement, and then you will get greater opportunities in the manufacturing sector and more high-range jobs in the R&D sector and in universities. The whole thing breeds of itself.

That is why I have said previously that we should regard our coal and uranium resources as competitive disadvantages: because they blind us to the opportunities that could be generated by setting a strategic industry policy and asking, ‘Where will Australia’s competitive advantage be in the 21st century in a carbon constrained world?’ Let us develop an energy and transport policy mix—an industry mix—that addresses all of those things. That is what I was seeking to do with this inquiry.

We need to have the debate first about what we consider to be dangerous anthropogenic climate change. When we answer that question, we must ask how we are going to pay for the changes that are necessary and set up the relevant regulatory frameworks and incentives to make that happen. Then we have to ask how we are going to address that challenge locally, regionally, nationally and globally in terms of Asia-Pacific and overseas trade. That is the kind of strategic thinking that we need to be doing. It is no use for the minister to stand up time and time again and say, ‘By 2050, we need a 60 per cent reduction in greenhouse gases,’ when there is no strategy for achieving that. Yes, there are various initiatives. There is the Solar Cities program, for example. But at the same time the rebate for solar hot water has been taken away. There is no comprehensive, integrated strategy.

The government, in observing the work that I and Senator Siewert—who chaired that committee—have done with the oil inquiry, would recognise that we have been dedicated to the task of trying, without politicking, to get some strategic thinking and planning happening with regard to the issues of transport fuels, sustainability, jobs growth and innovation in Australia. That is what I was asking for from the government with this proposal: a Senate inquiry looking at energy efficiency and the capacity for demand side reduction in Australia, along with how we can meet our energy needs into the future—the supply side. It would also look at what the costs are and what the target is that we are trying to meet. We are going to end up at next year’s Australian federal election with the Australian people not knowing what the challenge ahead of us is in terms of greenhouse gas reductions—they are simply not going to know.

The tragedy is that some scientists are saying that it is already too late and that we cannot mitigate dangerous climate change but are now going to have to adapt to it. Others are saying that we have 15 years. That is why I have no patience with the nuclear debate. Nuclear, if used for electricity—which only represents 39 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions anyway—would not come on stream for 10 to 15 years, and that is too late. We need action tomorrow, but there is no point in taking action unless you have a strategic plan and an integrated mix of policies. Climate change should have made every legislator—every parliamentarian—recognise that the environment is not just a side issue; it is an everyday issue.

It is about the quality of life of Australians. It is about Australia’s coastal regions potentially being flooded through extreme storm events or sea level rise. We have extreme droughts. We have all sorts of problems coming down the line in the aquaculture industry because of warming waters and with the natural fisheries industry because of overfishing and changed patterns in where fish are because of changed ocean currents. We have a slowing down of the global ocean conveyor. We have acidification of the Southern Ocean. We already have disease in Australia, with more people dying because of heat related stress. We have the potential for alien invasive species changing their habitat range because of climate change.

In Orange last year, we had for 10 days temperatures of over 45 degrees and they had to evacuate the nursing home. We have infrastructure that cannot cope in the changed circumstances. We have huge challenges. We have Queensland assessing its schools to see if they all need airconditioning because it is too hot now for students to be at school and that means a huge energy requirement. If you are going to put airconditioning in those schools, you need to link it with an energy source. In South Australia we have the Roxby Downs uranium mine, which needs a desalination plant. How are they going to fuel that? There is the potential to use geothermal, but they could just use gas or coal.

These are the kinds of strategic issues Australia has to face. I am really sorry that the government has, once again, failed to grasp the opportunity to have the Senate work as it should—that is, to come together, cross-party, to look at the strategic issues facing Australia and to try to come up with ways of addressing them. Let me tell you that out there in the community people are prepared to make changes because of climate change. The community is way ahead of the government on this whole issue of energy, climate, innovation, environment, and future strategy and policy. That is why I think Australia needs an integrated industry and energy policy that will take us into the 21st century in a sustainable way and in a way that allows for human potential in Australia to be adequately achieved, instead of a way that sees people leaving the country because innovation is occurring offshore. Germany and Japan have built a solar industry. China is moving rapidly towards renewables. We are seeing it all over the world, except here in Australia.

I recognise that the government is going to vote this motion down. I still do not understand why the opposition is going to vote against this inquiry. I understand that at the whips meeting yesterday it was made clear that we were going to debate this today, so I cannot understand how that message did not get to Senator O’Brien but apparently it did not. However, this is an attempt to deal with greenhouse gas emissions in a logical and strategic way. It is an attempt to ask the big picture questions and then start to address the integrated mix of employment, industry, ecology and energy into the future. That is not something that we are currently seeing. It is regrettable that the government will not even stand up and explain itself. The government has no industry policy and no energy policy for Australia. It has no employment policy for Australia, and it most certainly does not have a climate change or integrated environment policy for Australia which recognises the great threat of climate change.

We have Al Gore with his film An Inconvenient Truth making a huge impact in the United States and, hopefully, around the world. We are seeing big business shifting. Australian business is begging the government for a carbon signal—to put a price on carbon, to go with an emissions trading system, to look at a carbon tax for transport fuels, in particular, and to look at the mix you might get with those regulatory frameworks and incentives. But the government is turning its back. It seems only interested in digging holes in the ground—that is the industry sector that the government seems intent on staying with. It is a 1788 policy. It is sheep’s back, holes in the ground, quarry policy.

We need a sophisticated energy, industry, environment and employment policy, and that is what the Greens are asking for with this inquiry. It is tragic to see that we are not going to get the support for it, and there is no alternative in place. Neither the government nor the opposition have any propositions in place to have this issue addressed. When people look back on this period of government, they are going to see Australia’s failure to recognise that the world had shifted to carbon constraint and that that offered threats and opportunities for Australia. But Australia has completely neglected the opportunities. It has said that it was too hard and that it would do its old industry friends at the big end of town out of business.

The response was not to challenge that, which is a false assumption, but to go with it and leave Australia vulnerable, leave our economy vulnerable and not resilient, and leave our community extremely vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. We have to accept the fact that, when we were asked to rise to the occasion in terms of global responsibility for dealing with the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, Australia did not have a government in power that was intelligent enough to absorb the extent of the challenge that faces this country right now. I regret the responses from the other parties. I appreciate the fact that the Democrats are supporting this inquiry, and I would ask people to reconsider as the vote is taken.

Question put:

That the motion (Senator Milne’s) be agreed to.