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

I was not asking for a target; I was asking for the effective potential that the government knows about and has identified for saving power to be used in new industry, without us having to build new polluting thermal power stations or other options. After more than 10 years in office, can the parliamentary secretary tell us what the potential for energy efficiency in Australia is?

The Rocky Mountain Institute, which has been a world leader in this field at least since the 1980s, looks at countries like Australia as having a potential saving of 30 to 40 per cent. That seems astonishing, but people who have investigated what a real effort to save energy without reducing output or the goods available to us might produce know that you save a lot of money when you do that. There are savings not only in energy consumption by current consumers and, therefore, in the price passed on to people buying goods that might come from the manufacturing sector, for example, but also for the shareholders involved. Senator Milne has just told the committee about the advantage of this Greens amendment in making sure that shareholders have access to the information about savings to be made to that bottom line—which many people are so often interested in—by an energy efficiency coming out of an energy efficiency audit. I was asking: after 11 years of studying this, could the minister tell the committee what the government’s assessment of the energy efficiency potential for this nation is?