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

What an incredible failure of vision is involved in those statements. Firstly, if you did take industry as being 40 per cent and a 30 per cent cut was achievable, there is 12 per cent cut out of the Australian current consumption and available for new use. But the parliamentary secretary is saying that the government is banking on there being no cut in domestic consumption, no cut in the retail sector and no cut in the agricultural sector. The government is happy to allow business as usual, and that is fatuous. It is so last century. It is incredible that it is coming out of a government seven years into this century. If industry can achieve a 30 per cent cut, there is a strong argument that the other sectors can achieve bigger cuts than that. That is where we should be aiming.

Energy efficiency is the best way to provide power for new users because when you switch off a light the power that was used there is available to switch on a light for some productive purpose in some new installation—it is as simple as that. But the parliamentary secretary says that regardless of that we will be building new power stations. That is illogical. To be putting vast investment into that—including into Mr Howard’s favoured option of nuclear power—is incredible when energy efficiency, which creates no greenhouse gas emissions and is so much cheaper and so much more job productive, can do that job.

What Senator Milne and I are uncovering here is a government that simply does not know what it is doing. It simply does not have priorities; it does not have a plan. Eleven years after coming into office, it is still treating climate change in a cavalier manner and showing that there is a better nous in the average primary school student about climate change than there is in the current cabinet and leadership of this country. It is reckless to say that we will go ahead with nuclear power even if energy efficiency is there as a viable option without the hazard, without the cost and without the division that that Howard option would bring to the Australian community.

Meanwhile the opposition supports the government in opposing these amendments which would mean that we would be equipped rapidly, with the first report coming down in 18 months, with the knowledge about the contribution that energy efficiency can give this country—knowledge that this government should have had 11 years ago. We could then move on to implementing the gains from that, which are going to save us from having to establish more thermal stations in a decade when clean coal—the other thing that the Prime Minister; the opposition leader, Mr Rudd; and Mr Garrett talk about—is not available. The Stern report said that we must act within a decade to save our kids from extraordinary impacts from climate change, which Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany, can see is a potential disaster for humankind.

But here we have studied ignorance. We have the government saying, ‘We will not allow the Greens amendment through because that would allow us to discover how much energy efficiency this country has the potential to achieve,’ knowing that would mean that we do not need to establish either polluting coal-fired power stations or dangerous nuclear power stations, to which the Prime Minister is attracted. This is studied ignorance from a government which has its mind back somewhere in the last century. It is the government’s responsibility to establish what the targets are here. Here we are talking about energy efficiency—which is cheap, is good for business, improves profits, creates jobs and, as you get the technology for it, creates export opportunities—and the government is saying: ‘We don’t want to measure that. We’ll leave it to the Europeans to grab the world advantage in that. We want to be back with the polluters, Saudi Arabia and Russia included, because the coal industry has control over our policy basis.’

Studied ignorance can never be accepted. But turning down this amendment is studied ignorance by the government. It is a deplorable attitude. This is going to have to be made up by future governments a few years or many years down the line at far greater expense to this country. If you do not have the information base, you are not able to plan and you are not able to establish options. The climate change spectre hangs over us. The reality of climate change—the droughts, the worst bushfires, the worst cyclones, the increased coastal erosion coming from sea level rises and the feeling of concern about it in the community, which is a negative—is being ignored by this government, which should be putting itself at last onto a basis of best practice in gaining information.

Senator Milne’s amendment says, ‘Let’s get that information’—we all know it is readily gettable—‘and put some expertise into having a report back to parliament and consequent reports.’ The government says no. It is incredible that this government can turn its back on its past failures and also wants to compound them into the future with this minimalist attitude to its high responsibility for tackling climate change to the advantage of business, families and the environment in Australia. It cannot do that. This particular moment is just an indicator of how far short of the mark this government is. This amendment should not be here; it should be in this legislation. It should have been legislated 10 years ago. Instead of that, we have the parliamentary secretary effectively saying: ‘I don’t want to know. We will leave it to business to work it out as it goes along, on a business-by-business basis, but I don’t want to know what can be achieved in Australia to deal with climate change.’

I know his direction has come from the prime ministerial office, but he has a responsibility to be able to adequately answer the challenge that comes out of amendments like this. There is no adequate answer from the government. What makes this all the more worrying is that the opposition agrees—there is studied ignorance from the government and studied ignorance from the Labor Party. If there is some reason why we should not know what the potential for energy efficiency is in this country, let us hear it. I have not heard it today and we are not going to hear it if the minister continues to fail to rise to the challenge of taking up a positive amendment like this. We are going to get a negative response from both the government and the opposition.