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

I am just indicating the Greens will not be supporting this amendment. The Productivity Commission is notoriously conservative and actually wrong when it comes to climate policy. As I indicated before, my fear is that there will be a complete contradiction in the government’s policy here in terms of on the one hand having a climate objective and on the other hand wanting infrastructure projects. My fear is that the infrastructure projects will undermine climate policy unless they are aligned. If this were referred to the Productivity Commission, that would be absolutely guaranteed to be the outcome.

The Productivity Commission do not understand climate change. They have got it notoriously wrong up until now. In climate circles they are best remembered for their 2005 paper on energy efficiency where they deemed that there were no opportunities in energy efficiency on the basis that, if there were, people would have taken them up. They have not—therefore they do not exist. It is completely in contradiction with everything. Everyone knows that the lowest hanging fruit in terms of climate policy is energy efficiency.

In their response to the critique of climate policy, in their Garnaut submission and so on they have been absolutely outrageous. In the Stern review, Stern concluded that, because a life today is equivalent to a life tomorrow, there should be a zero discount rate applied. The Productivity Commission obviously decided that that was not the case and determined that the value of a human life in 50 years time is a tiny fraction of its current worth. That is a complete nonsense. Their submission to the Garnaut report can only be said to be offbeat—they suggest, in looking at the analysis of emissions trajectories, that global emissions could peak as late as 2030. That demonstrates to me that they have absolutely no idea about, and have completely failed to come to terms with, climate policy.

The Productivity Commission are also actively undermining the government’s own mandatory renewable energy target policy. While the government’s policy is 20 per cent by 2020, they recommend that it not exist at all, that we get rid of the mandatory renewable energy target. If it was left up to the Productivity Commission, I can guarantee that the infrastructure projects would not take into account either peak oil or climate change and would seriously undermine any effort the government made to make progress on climate.