Lyn Allison (Victoria, Australian Democrats) Share this | Hansard source

The Democrats strongly support this reference to the Economics Committee on the matter of feed-in tariffs. I will not refer to Senator Ronaldson’s invective but try to sort out the substantive arguments he was attempting to make. One of those was that this is premature before we have an emissions trading system. This is nothing to do with emissions trading. This is to give an as of right to individuals—whether it is someone with solar panel on their rooftop or whether it is a wind farm or whether it is hot rocks power generation—to feed electricity onto our grid. That is called distributed generation. That means moving away from the big coal fired power stations and distributing energy generation more broadly around this country.

The opportunities to do that were taken away to some extent when we moved in this country to a national grid, with privatisation and restructuring of the electricity sector. There is little incentive for the electricity grid to pick up on those electricity generators who create more energy than they need. That is what this is about. There is nothing new about it. Germany has been doing it for some time and very successfully. It is to remove a barrier to those generators who produce electricity to get it onto the grid and to set a fair price for the electricity that is so generated.

So it is absurd for Senator Ronaldson to say that we have to wait until we have got economic modelling and that it does not take into account the aspirations of the wider community. What an absurd thing to say. Seventy-four per cent of Australians, in a survey just the other day, said that they would prefer to see renewable energy and energy efficiency as the top priorities for government in encouraging reductions in greenhouse emissions. They do not want nuclear; they do not want clean coal. They do want an emissions trading system and they have been wanting one for a while. What they want is an emphasis on renewable energy, particularly energy efficiency. This reference to the committee would provide an opportunity to debate how we could introduce such a scheme into this country. The states have dropped this; they do not want to know about it, which is a great disappointment, because they could introduce a feed-in tariff. For some reason they are reluctant to do so. It does not mean the end of the world economically. It would not necessarily mean that electricity prices would be higher. It is simply saying that we now need to move to a situation where not all of our electricity is generated by big coal fired power stations. We need to move to a situation where there is a much broader range of generation from a more diverse set of locations around the country, whether that is you with your solar panel on your house—in my case, in Port Melbourne—or whether it is another, bigger generation of various sorts in a different location.

So this is nothing to do—and I emphasise this—with emissions trading; nothing whatsoever. In fact, it has links with the mandated renewable energy target and it would facilitate much quicker and better access by those who were part of the MRET scheme if it were agreed on. Conservation groups are interested in energy and in improving our appalling record on greenhouse emissions in this country. There has been a 143 per cent increase on 1990 levels in our greenhouse emissions from electricity generation. This move would go a long way to solving some of the problems for those who would want to bring electricity onto the grid. MRET, as we all know, is not going far enough. Because of its low target, because so many sources of electricity comply, MRET is going to see a fall-off this year in new projects that rely on that target for their viability.

This is an important reference. It is disappointing that the government is not prepared to talk about it. It just means that we at this end of the chamber have to keep bringing it to the attention of government. It would have been good to have had the experts come together so that we could have a report and demonstrate just the point that I have made—that this is nothing to do with emissions trading.