Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

That is remarkable, because we are in an age of climate change which is already impacting on the economy, as well as on the stability of global governance and the wellbeing of coming generations. If there is one immediate option that is available to this government to get a transition through to alternative energies, including its own much-mooted but totally unproven option of clean coal, it is energy efficiency. World expertise shows that through simple energy-efficient measures industry, the domestic sector, the retail sector and the primary produce sector, including resource extraction, can cut current use of electricity by 30 per cent to make it available for new users.

If that were really tested it would mean that we have some decades worth of breathing space in terms of not increasing impacts on the atmosphere by building new coal-fired thermal power stations, for example. But we are not going to get there simply by saying, ‘Leave it to the good industries out there—or households, universities or whatever it might be—to adopt energy efficiency and the polluters can keep doing what they do without any regulation.’

Shortly, Senator Milne will be moving Greens amendments to put some legislative action behind this. If we are going to succeed in this world of climate change, we need stick as well as carrot so that the polluters who will not play the game properly can be brought into line and those who are squandering energy find that the days of squander are over. We need to divert wasted energy into new uses; that means that we do not have to build new thermal power stations.

But the government say, ‘No, we will allow the waste to continue, and we will continue to reward the polluters’—the lazy if not malevolent polluters who do not care about the future and will continue the sceptical view of climate change as if it were not a big issue confronting the world. Well, it is a big issue. The government should be leading with an energy efficiency bill which will provide a template to ensure that those who do the right thing get rewarded and those who do the wrong thing get penalised. It is simple goodwill practice.

I suspect we are going to see the government using its numbers again to knock down amendments to this legislation from the Greens and the Democrats which would give it teeth. Let that be on the government’s record. The government should be supporting these amendments as the Greens do. It should be supporting the Greens amendments that will be moved next.