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

I return to the amendments, which the Greens have moved, and the two components of these amendments. Solar water heaters and heat pumps are no longer eligible to create certificates, and biomass from native vegetation is no longer an eligible renewable energy source. I just want to go back to the minister’s response in relation to what I had to say about heat pumps and solar hot water crowding out, from the renewable energy target, new renewable energy generation technologies.

Those that are likely to be impacted most are things like concentrating solar thermal and hot-rock geothermal because, to date, these technologies have not played a significant part in the MRET to the end of 2008. In fact it is around 0.01 per cent of the total from geothermal anyway. But they are seen as having great potential in the longer term. What the minister said was that her modelling does not suggest it is going to be a problem. It seems to me that if you have academics saying it is going to be 20 per cent of the RETs to 2020 that are going to be taken up by these technologies, there is a vast difference between what that modelling shows and what the government says. So I would like to have further detail about whether the government can confirm that, to date, about 24 per cent of all the RETs generated to the end of 2008 have come from solar and heat-pump water heaters. If that is the case they are going to crowd out renewable energy, and I return to my point that it should be over the top, as indeed the coal gas is, because it is not renewable energy. It is energy efficiency—we like it, we love it and we want it to be there—but we do not want it to crowd out renewable energy. We want 20 per cent of renewables.

The other point I want to make is taking out the burning of native forests to generate energy. This is an absolute disgrace and it ought not to be classified as a renewable energy source. We have the largest carbon stores in the Southern Hemisphere being logged. Just because the industry can say, ‘Our intention is to log them for sawlog,’ the other 90 per cent of the forest therefore goes as woodchips and is eligible to be burnt in a furnace. I want a guarantee from the minister that not one single renewable energy certificate is going to be generated from native forests that are logged in Tasmania, Victoria or New South Wales.

We have had many forest campaigners say that they are ready to go into action over this. As soon as the government tries to continue this rort by encouraging the logging of native forests to burn there will be court cases. And, of course, there will be court cases over this because it is so wrong. It is doublespeak and doublethink to go to Copenhagen and say that we are interested in reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation. We tell the Indonesians we are going to provide $200 million to stop them logging their forests and here we are putting the logging and burning of native forests into a so-called renewable energy target.

This is nothing more than a propping-up program for failing native forest businesses. That is what this is. It is the loggers saying they can no longer sell native forest woodchips overseas because the world does not want them and the result is that the price has dropped. This is a propping-up mechanism and it should not be tolerated. Apart from just saying it is government policy to log native forests and to support regional forest agreements, which destroy biodiversity, which destroy native forests, I would like to hear a justification for destroying ecosystems for supposedly renewable energy. It is not renewable energy; it is ecosystem destruction.