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

When the debate was adjourned for the lunchbreak today I was speaking on the need for Australia to establish an energy savings fund to look at providing funding to encourage energy savings and raise public awareness, to look at cost-effectiveness and to stimulate investment in innovative energy-saving measures. I consider it a completely unbalanced approach that the government is focused entirely on supply and not on reducing demand for energy.

For example, the government has recently announced its ban in relation to light globes. I am very pleased that we are going to see a transition to more energy efficient light globes. But what the government has not considered is the fact that many of the new varieties of light globes have mercury in them and also trigger epilepsy in a number of people. So there are going to be serious issues with the introduction of these. There will need to be some exemptions for people with medical conditions. Also, there may well need to be a deposit component so that you are required to take cradle-to-grave responsibility for these light globes.

If you had this kind of fund, it could fund the necessary research, policy development and so on for energy-saving devices, and there are endless numbers of them. There are different ways of reducing energy. We are going to have the rollout of smart meters—to whatever extent that occurs. I am unsure as to the level of commitment the government has to them. And of course we have all the issues surrounding mandatory energy performance standards, changes to the building code and so on. If we had such a fund, a whole range of innovative measures and technologies could be looked at.

It is exactly the same principle as a low-emissions technology fund to look at the supply side. I propose such a fund to look at the demand and energy efficiency side. It is quite a straightforward proposition, and I would be interested to know why the government is opposing setting up a fund for energy efficiency when it has in principle agreed with the notion of setting up a fund to increase renewable energy. Even though that has been distorted, it is still an in-principle decision to support the supply side but not the energy efficiency side.