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

I thank my colleagues for their remarks in relation to this motion. In particular, I would like to acknowledge the support for this reference from Senator Allison, from the Democrats, because I know that for a long time she has been supporting it. I have heard the Labor Party express support for a range of mechanisms in this regard, but I particularly want to address the remarks made by Senator Ronaldson. Not only is it shocking that a senator in this day and age can demonstrate such a low level of understanding of climate change and the financial mechanisms needed to respond to it, but what is even more shocking is that he is Chair of the Senate Standing Committee on Economics, to which this reference was to be referred.

Whilst the government and government members may be congratulating Senator Ronaldson for his strident opposition to this reference on feed-in laws, everyone out there in the community who wants a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, all those people in the renewable energy sector who are desperate for investment and all those that want investment in manufacturing and jobs in their rural communities will be horrified to know that the chair of the Senate economics committee is blocking the potential for that to occur. Everybody interested in the climate change debate, when the Prime Minister tries to tell Australia that he is no longer a sceptic on climate change, will be able to refer to the remarks made today and show that the government remains sceptical on climate change. It does not understand it and does not want to understand it.

If Senator Ronaldson had any idea he would understand the point that was being made. The point that was being made about emissions trading is that the committee and the Prime Minister have said that the price on carbon will be low and will start low, and we know that if you have a low carbon price there will be no investment in renewable energy. The experience overseas has been that emissions trading has done nothing for investment in renewable energy. The point that I was making is that an emissions trading law will accelerate energy efficiency. It will accelerate conversion to gas, but it will not involve real investment in commercialisation of renewable energy, and that is why you need complementary mechanisms.

So when Senator Ronaldson talked about narrow focus he can only have been referring to the government, and when he talked about a refusal to look at the global picture he can only have been talking about the government. In fact, it is the Greens who are looking at a broad, global perspective. For the benefit of the government and Senator Ronaldson, who apparently does not want the economics committee to know how the rest of the world is dealing with this and who does not want Treasury and the government to look at it, I would like to inform them that the following countries have all brought in feed-in laws: Austria, Brazil, Canada, China, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Italy, the Republic of Korea, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the US. So it seems as though the Greens are in extremely good company around the world when it comes to addressing the issue of renewable energy.

I note that up until the announcement by the Prime Minister that the government was going to have a task group to look at emissions trading Senator Ronaldson in the Senate had declared himself a climate sceptic time and time again. He stood up here until a couple of months ago and ridiculed the Greens for being concerned about global warming. He was arguing that it was not occurring, that there was not the scientific proof and so on. Now he is trying to suggest that somehow he has got the interests of the wider Australian community at heart.

The refusal to look at this issue of feed-in laws will be seen by the entire community wanting to deal with a reduction in greenhouse gases as sheer and utter ignorance from the government and it will reinforce the view in the Australian community that for 11 years the Howard government has dropped the ball on climate change. Senator Ronaldson may be feeling good about the tone of his remarks addressed to the Greens today, but the feedback the government will get is that the change to the committee system and the government’s ignorance on climate change are things that the community does not intend to reward—and I certainly hope that they will not reward it in the forthcoming federal election. Whatever happens, we cannot allow a chair of a Senate economics committee to be so ignorant about addressing the economics of climate change. That is humiliating for this country, and the government should not even be allowing it. They should be trying to pretend at least that they have a better grasp of the situation. First of all we had the Leader of the Government in the Senate last week demonstrating that he had no idea what a feed-in law was and now we have Senator Ronaldson expanding on that level of ignorance.

The point is that the Greens have been working on climate change and global warming for more than 20 years. We have been talking to people around the world. I have been attending global conferences on climate change for a very long time. And I am not alone in that. There are millions of people around the world working in the same way. The government ought to acknowledge that it is trying to catch up in a matter of a few months on what people have been doing for 20 years. We know that the ANU has sliver cell technology and they are desperate to commercialise that in Australia. It has been commercialised to one level by Origin Energy but will probably have to go offshore, as have Solar Heat and Power to California, as has Vestas in pulling out of Tasmania with wind energy, and as has Dr Shi in going to China.

It should be a matter of concern to the chair of the economics committee that Australia’s manufacturing sector has been hollowed out and he ought to be able to see that there is a real opportunity for investment in manufacturing and jobs in rural and regional Australia in renewable energy. He ought to be able to see that emissions trading does nothing for investment in renewable energy unless the price is high enough, and we know the price is not going to be high enough. As for the argument about the market taking care of it, I point out to Senator Ronaldson that an economist of much more senior status than himself, none other than Sir Nicholas Stern, has said that climate change represents the greatest market failure of all time. The market has failed the planet when it comes to climate change and global warming. We need intervention with market mechanisms plus regulation.

I return to the point I made earlier: once Australia decides what level of warming it is prepared to tolerate it must then decide the level of emissions cuts it needs and on the combination of mechanisms to get there. Emissions trading is one, plus a mandatory renewable energy target, plus a feed-in tariff. I think that the government is completely wrong in its reading of the Australian community. I have spoken to several people who say that they would love to have the opportunity to contribute to the solution to climate change by making it cost effective for them to generate renewable energy, and it is not cost effective for them to do it at the moment. People would love to cover their roofs with photovoltaics. Farmers would love to cover their sheds with photovoltaics. They would like to have a wind turbine on their property—one or two or three—but the capital cost is too great. That is what they say all time.

I am aware that another policy option that Labor has put forward is low-interest loans. My problem with that is that you still have to be in a credit situation to be able to borrow money in order to be able to repay the loans. The advantage of a feed-in law is, because it is a fixed price for the particular kind of renewable energy over a set period of time, you can borrow the money because you know that you can cover repayments in full. It is a fabulous mechanism for allowing people to do it.

In Germany—for the benefit of Senator Ronaldson—local governments have invested heavily in putting photovoltaics on the divide between highways. I notice that even in Victoria the Bracks government is moving to put photovoltaics on the noise buffers of one of its freeways. Anywhere you have a space you can invest in renewable energy providing it is cost effective for you to do so. If the government wants to win an election on climate change then it needs to persuade Australians that there is a capacity for everybody to participate in the generation of renewable energy and get excited about the potential to solve the problem, not tell them that it will actively block—and that is what this is doing—investment in renewable energy by refusing to consider feed-in tariffs and instead talk about its low-emissions technology fund, which everybody knows is overwhelmingly going to clean coal. Even BHP said this week that that technology is 20 years away. This is no response to climate change. We have got until 2015 for global emissions to peak and then to be reduced. Nuclear and clean coal, if ever, will not be on stream until at least the 2020s. So they are not a solution. We need to be using our good sense to bring in market mechanisms and regulation that actually work.

What is more, for a government that is worried about issues like subsidies, the feed-in laws are a mechanism that allows the financing of renewable energy in a way that is not a direct subsidy. So you should be interested in that, but instead of that we have the chair of the Senate economics committee demonstrating that he knows nothing about it and that in fact at heart he remains a climate sceptic. He is getting on board with mumbo-jumbo about emissions trading because he does not even understand that—he has just grabbed a few lines out of the report. He does not understand the connections and what an emissions trading scheme might do, what a feed-in law might do and what a mandatory renewable energy target might do. I express deep regret and, in fact, anger about the fact that the government wants to be so ignorant on addressing climate change and greenhouse gas emissions. It is not about politics; it is about future generations. It is about enabling people to make a difference. All we are seeing is studied ignorance.

In another 10 or 15 years, as the climate deteriorates, we will have more extreme weather events and the droughts around Australia will dig deeper into rural and regional Australia, as we have already seen with the collapse of the Murray-Darling and the bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef, and as we are going to see with sea level rises and coastal vulnerability. When that occurs and we see the billions that it is currently costing and will cost, then people like Senator Ronaldson and the government members who are supporting him need to take personal responsibility for the actions they are taking now to prevent this country playing its role in reducing global emissions. This is a case of personal responsibility because unlike other things it is going to happen and is happening in our lifetime. So we are all going to be held accountable whether we like it or not. If the government is going to block renewable energy and solutions to climate change, I am glad that the chair of the economics committee can be held up and shown to the other chairs of economics committees in all the countries around the world and it can be said, ‘This is the best the Australian government can do on economics’—roll him out as a speaker.

On that basis, I express regret that the government is not even open enough to the idea of Treasury opening its mind to the possibility of feed-in laws. I have no doubt that we will have feed-in laws in Australia but we will have them later than we should have had them because the government blocked them. When feed-in laws come in, no doubt we will hear the same senators standing up and saying, ‘Oh, if only we had known in 2007 what we know now, of course we would have proceeded.’ Well, they cannot say that because they do know now. The Greens stand here and tell them that this is the experience overseas and this is what we should be doing in Australia. What we are seeing is studied ignorance from a government which remains sceptical of climate change in the face of the greatest catastrophe facing humankind and the ecological systems of the planet. I ask the government to reconsider its position on this motion regarding the reference to the economics committee, and I urge the Senate to support it.

Question put:

That the motion (Senator Milne’s) be agreed to.