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

Senator Brown always gets upset when we draw attention to the Greens’ policies on drugs and on taxes on the family home. Every time I mention it I know I can get him to rise in his place and take a point of order, but I will not stop mentioning the fact that the Greens misrepresent their own policies by pretending they are green when in fact most of their policies are quite destructive social policies that would actually tear communities apart.

On climate change, which is an incredibly important issue, and addressing energy efficiency, which is an incredibly important and effective way of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, we are ensuring that we have more energy efficient buildings through building codes and we are also encouraging, through best practice in both residential and commercial construction, energy efficient buildings. This is an incredibly important way to mitigate future greenhouse gas emissions in Australia and, indeed, around the world.

The Energy Efficiency Opportunities Act 2006, probably another key environmental measure that Senator Brown totally missed, requires Australia’s large energy consumers—I think anyone using over 0.5 of a petajoule, which is the top 250 energy users, who use about 80 per cent of Australia’s energy—to do an energy efficiency audit. If you read the papers and can get past the social pages, you will find advertisements throughout Australian newspapers reminding Australian companies that use that amount of energy that they are required to undertake those energy efficiency audits and then, once they are done, produce a plan to introduce energy efficiency actions within their companies and report against them annually. That is a mandatory requirement.

What you see in Australia, rather than the Greens saying, ‘Oh, let’s have another inquiry,’ is that we are taking action. We are taking action at the household level. We are producing green guides for people who are renovating their homes. We have a guide where anyone who is doing a home renovation can get access to information from the Australian Greenhouse Office website which will show them how to do renovations in a greenhouse-friendly manner. We are also doing that for commercial buildings. We are ensuring that when people buy appliances they can put energy efficient appliances into their home. So there is action both at the household level and at the commercial level to ensure that energy efficiency opportunities are used as one of the key measures.

It is important to understand that you cannot just do energy efficiency and you cannot just do renewables. We know that you need to have a substantial increase in renewable energy in the world if you are to address dangerous climate change. You need to do that, you need energy efficiency, but you cannot do that without addressing cleaning up coal or capturing carbon and storing it. The Greens and some people in the Labor Party say, ‘Let’s just close down the coalmining industry; let’s close down Hazelwood power station; let’s not build any more power stations that burn coal,’ when in fact the answer is that you do need energy efficiency measures, you do need clean coal technologies, you do need carbon capture technologies, you do need fuel switching. You need to sell Australian natural gas to China, Japan, Korea and North America and see as many facilities as possible in those countries switching to gas from coal or oil. But again we have the Greens saying: ‘No, we don’t want a natural gas industry in the Burrup. We want to stop that industry because of impacts on rock art.’ The Australian Greens, who pretend they care about the environment, are saying: ‘No, we can’t spent money on carbon capture and storage. That’s an inappropriate thing for the public to spend money on.’

We cannot even have an inquiry into nuclear power. That has been out of bounds for 30 years in Australia because of the ideological hang-ups of people like Senator Brown and people in the Labor Party. We are saying you need a whole range of technologies, and yet the Greens would rule out carbon capture and storage. They would rule out the gas industry and they would rule out the nuclear industry. So there you have three billion tonnes per annum of abatement across the globe and the Greens are saying no to it. You wonder just how serious they are about climate change.

We know they are serious about drugs policies that hurt families; we know that they are serious about tax policies that hurt families. From their actions and their policies, we know that they are not serious about climate change. I will not be lectured to by Senator Brown on the need for an inquiry into energy efficiency when this government sees energy efficiency as a substantial and important part of a portfolio based approach to addressing climate change that includes action on renewables, action on energy efficiency, action on carbon capture and storage, action on making vehicles more efficient, action that encourages fuel switching and action that encourages land use changes—such as stopping deforestation. Land clearing in Australia has virtually come to an end under this government and the planting of new trees has never been greater. We are on track to plant somewhere between 750 million and a billion trees under this government, all of them out there growing and sequestering carbon in a very natural way. We have also had the political boldness to say, ‘If you’re serious about climate change, you also need to use nuclear power in the world. Let’s address Australia’s role in the nuclear fuel cycle.’ You need all of these seven technologies, but the Greens would rule three of them out because of ideological baggage.

Progress reported.