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

I move:

That the Senate take note of the document.

I rise tonight particularly to note that, although the Office of the Renewable Energy Regulator is a statutory authority and supposedly has some degree of independence, I am really disappointed with its annual report of 2005-06. It is reporting on significant issues and developments with regard to the whole process of the mandatory renewable energy target, and it really ducks the truth about what occurred. It says:

The report of the Tambling committee, appointed to conduct the review of the MRET (as required under section 162 of the Renewable Energy (Electricity) Act 2000) reported in January 2004. The review confirmed support for the continuation of the scheme, and also recommended a number of changes to the administrative and policy settings supporting the target.

It then goes on to say that the new act implements the changes and so on. What it does not say is that it failed to adopt the main recommendation of the Tambling report. So anyone reading this annual report who does not know what Tambling said finds in here a reference to the Tambling committee that implies that the recommendations of Tambling were somehow accommodated when Tambling said that MRET targets should continue to increase beyond 2010 at a rate equal to the rate before 2010 and to stabilise at 20,000 gigawatt hours in 2020—in other words, to increase the target and extend the period of time. There is no reference to that here.

In looking at this whole issue of renewable energy and significant issues and developments, the annual report fails to point out that, as a result of the refusal of the government to extend the target, we are going to have a situation where, by 2020, renewable energy will make up a mere 8.5 per cent of energy generated from renewables because there has been no extension of the target. I am really disappointed that this statutory authority has failed to report accurately on what the Tambling report actually said in its review of MRET. It just implies that everything is going along normally and does not indicate to anyone reading this that the failure to extend the target means that we are going backwards on renewable energy, and I find that really disconcerting.

Also, it talks about the installation rate of solar water heaters but fails to say that the government is phasing out support for solar water heating because it is phasing out the rebate. No mention of that in this report either—just a statement saying:

The installation rate of solar water heaters ... continues to rise, increasing the volume of RECs related to this particular energy source.

So I find it unacceptable that you can get a report from a statutory authority, the whole purpose of which is to oversee the Mandatory Renewable Energy Target Scheme, and it does not actually talk about what it means when the government fails to implement the main finding of the independent review.

I am glad Minister Campbell is in here, because I would like him to respond to that and to explain whether his office, or he personally, had anything to do with the fact that this report does not accurately reflect what the Tambling report said in its assessment of the MRET and in fact does not accurately reflect those recommendations. We know that, because of the government’s failure to extend MRET, Vestas has gone overseas; Roaring 40s has gone—they have gone to China because of the failure to increase the MRET; and Origin Energy and their sliver cells are going—they require $100 million in order to commercialise; they have their pilot plant in Adelaide and they are going.

We have China with a 15 per cent renewable energy target, India with a 20 per cent target, the UK with a 10 per cent target—and Australia with its measly two per cent, which has already been achieved in this country. And we cannot even set anything as ambitious as those other countries have done. Australia must increase its mandatory renewable energy target, and the minister should explain to this House why the report of the regulator does not in fact point out that we are going backwards rather than forwards as a result of the government’s failure to implement this main recommendation of the Tambling report. We have a situation where the renewable energy sector is unanimously calling for an increase in the target—(Time expired)