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

It is quite clear that the government has a much greater faith in corporations and the transparency of their reporting than has been the experience in Australia with the corporate sector. One only has to look at the ethical investment and social responsibility sectors to see that there are a number of companies that are not interested in that level of reporting. The Global Reporting Initiative and any number of initiatives have tried to force companies to be more transparent, and that is not occurring. That is why I have moved these two amendments.

We say that if an energy efficiency opportunity identified during an energy efficiency assessment is assessed by the corporations as having a payback period of less than 10 years then the company must report the details of the opportunity and the payback period in a report, as detailed in section 21. It must also include the details of the opportunity and the payback period in its next annual report, thereby informing its shareholders that there are energy savings opportunities. That gives shareholders an opportunity to judge the performance of the board against what the company is actually doing. What I am seeking here is greater transparency, greater requirements to report, greater capacity for government to assess how this scheme is going, to generally improve corporate governance and to give Australia a much better idea of the opportunities and the speed with which we could make the changes we need to make, given that we have to make deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions by reducing energy use in a very short time frame.