Lyn Allison (Victoria, Australian Democrats) Share this | Hansard source

The Democrats will support this amendment moved by Senator Milne and, as has already been observed, we have a similar amendment but it has an even higher target. We took our target from the submissions made to a number of inquiries, including the Lurching Forward, Looking Back report into the energy white paper, so we do support this. It is a pity that Labor cannot bring themselves to also support this, because it is not something that we have dreamed up. It has been a commonplace recommendation. In the case of the Milne amendment, if I can put it that way, it was recommended in the Tambling report, which is the government’s own report. We are acting on the best advice that has been received. The government has not been able to say why this should not take place, and it is disappointing that Labor cannot take that extra step. They are prepared to ratify Kyoto, and that is good. They recognise that there are deficiencies in MRET, which is also good, but I wonder why Labor cannot say what is actually wrong with it.

We need to be specific. That is the whole point of the MRET scheme. That is why we have 9,500 gigawatt hours—it is a specific target. I think, in fact, it would better to have a percentage. Let us go for 20 per cent of the actual by 2020. That is really what our amendment does but, of course, we do not know what the energy consumption level will be by 2020. We could be way out, as indeed the government was when it set up this target. I am all for going for a percentage. In fact, maybe we should have put an amendment up to that effect, but the government argued for certainty. It wanted to be able to tell the industry exactly what the gigawatt hours were year by year, and that is why it was converted to a target such as 9,500 gigawatt hours.

I will not speak any further on my amendment because it has all been said before. There are good arguments for these targets to be increased one way or the other to 20,000 gigawatt hours, or 30,000 in the case of our amendment. They are all justifiable. They have all been said before. They have all been put up by those who know what Australia is capable of doing and what is affordable. So I reject the minister’s argument that poor old Comalco will have to find a bit more money to pay for the energy they consume, which they consume in huge quantities of course. That is why Australia is attractive to Comalco and other aluminium smelters. We said earlier that we have the cheapest energy in the OECD. I was just looking at the Tambling report and there we are right down the bottom, even behind the United States, which is saying something. So it is time that we increased our prices for electricity, and the best way to do that is through the MRET scheme.