Ian Campbell (WA, Liberal Party, Minister for the Environment and Heritage) Share this | Hansard source

I genuinely welcome the opportunity that Senator Milne is creating in the parliament to focus attention on our renewable energy programs. They are world leading and quite phenomenonal, and they are something we should be proud of. The fact that Senator Milne is helping to create a controversy around them helps me. I spend a lot of my time trying to figure out how I can get the message out about what we are doing. Where we have a difference is that I happen to think that we need to use all of the clean energy sources available to us in Australia. I am not ideologically opposed to cleaning up coal or geosequestration in carbon or to finding more efficient ways to use coal or fossil fuels. I happen to believe deeply that that is going to be a large part of the solution. But I also believe equally strongly in having strong support for solar energy in this country, as well as a range of other technologies, such as hybrid technologies, where you link—for example, with the Newcastle CSIRO solar centre—the use of solar thermal concentrators to boost the energy coefficient of natural gas, getting the gas’s energy coefficient up by 30 per cent, which is a breakthrough way of storing solar energy. I believe you have to have all of those technologies. I believe that, when it comes to addressing the climate challenge, if you care deeply about the environment, as I do, then you leave your ideologies parked at the door and back the technologies that can make a difference.

I think Senator Milne and I agree on a lot of those technologies. Where we disagree is that I do not have any ideological problems with pursuing clean coal technologies, or even nuclear technologies, because they will all make a difference to helping us pass on a much cleaner environment to the coming generations.

Question agreed to.