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

The Greens will not be opposing this bill, but how far short of the mark it falls, particularly after the government’s agreement with the coalition. There ought to have been a target of 30 per cent. Not only would that have stimulated the renewables industry but it would have created more than 10,000 extra jobs across the country. It ought to have included better opportunity for regional and rural Australia, not least those communities which are not connected with the grid, but that has been capped and they have been restricted, and it ought not have been a further big handout to the big polluters, but it will be, and it will include windfall gains. They will actually make profits out of this at some stages of the market while the rest of the community feels repressed. People still feel that this is not the energy-efficient country that our competitors around the world are. It is a big day for the big polluters, the big corporations, the big energy guzzlers. It gives some stimulus to the renewable energy industry but none of the world-leading stimulus that this nation should be putting out to that industry.

The darkest part of it is that native forests will be logged, put into furnaces, like at the pulp mill in Tasmania and at the woodchip mill at Eden, using the term ‘green power’. The people who do that are going to be rewarded, fostered, by the Rudd government in their destruction of the habitat of rare and endangered species, and people will probably end up paying a premium for this most destructive of pursuits, called ‘green energy’. That is a lie; that is a deception and an affront to the natural heritage of this country. But there you have it. It is such a lost opportunity.

I congratulate Senator Milne and her staff for the work they have put into this and the relationship they have with the renewable energy industry in this country. I can assure that industry and the Australian people that the Greens will continue in this place in the years ahead to lead the field in the debate on promoting a carbon-free future and rewarding those who really deserve the rewards rather than the big polluters.

Question agreed to.

Bills read a third time.