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

I rise today to say that the Australian Greens also support National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting Amendment Bill 2009 and recognise that it is an amendment to a framework for reporting greenhouse gas emissions. Clearly that is needed. There needs to be a rigorous process for actually auditing the greenhouse gas emissions, and obviously compliance comes with that. However, there are a couple of issues which remain outstanding as far as the Australian Greens are concerned, and I have circulated a couple of amendments to this legislation. They are similar to the issues that I raised when this bill was first introduced into the Senate, and I want to foreshadow that I will be moving these amendments in the committee stage when we get to that part of the bill.

The amendments that I intend to move to this legislation go to two particular matters. The first one is facility-level reporting rather than reporting the totals of a corporation. This goes to this issue of transparency, public information and corporate accountability. It is the view of the Australian Greens that you should be reporting at the facility level so that, for example, a community can find out the specific emissions from a certain power station—a certain point source—and not just be able to find out that a corporate group across Australia, which may operate half a dozen facilities, has an emissions level of X. The community should be able to come down to look at which of the operations are the biggest polluters across a corporation or a particular corporate group. That is the first one. We need to go beyond just reporting the whole of a corporation—the total. We need to have the total but we need to be able to break that down into individual facility-level reporting. I would be interested to know why the government continues to hold out and say that that is not necessary. I presume that the argument will be that it is commercial information and therefore is validly confidential.

I would argue that the community has a right to know where our largest point source emitters are in order to be able to get greater accountability from a company. Some of the numbers are going to be quite substantial across corporations and you are not going to be able to have a sense of where the changes are being made and where the pressure needs to come on, particularly in terms of putting pressure on to increase the efficiency and to look at the level of subsidies and compensation and so on that is going to go to those corporations that have individual facilities amongst a whole lot that are particularly big greenhouse gas emitters. That is the point in terms of facility reporting.

The second issue is the threshold of the level at which you might report. Of course, there are lots of different ideas about where you would establish the particular level. The government has gone to 25,000 tonnes. The Greens believe that we should reduce that to 10,000 and I would note that in the European Union reporting framework all emissions above one kilotonne must be rigorously accounted for in terms of liable entities under the emissions trading scheme. So I would like the government to indicate whether they would be prepared to take the threshold down to 10,000 as opposed to 25,000 tonnes. I think that that would be in line with best practice and where we will be going in the future. If not accepting that now, we should at least be agreeing to the phasing in of it. Our amendment relates to a phase-in period. But in principle there are two issues: one is facility-level reporting as opposed to totality across a corporation and the other is in terms of the threshold at which you would be required to report.

In foreshadowing those amendments that will be coming later in the committee stage, basically, the Greens are going to support the amendments the government has brought in to tighten up some of the aspects of the audit requirements. I do think that it is important that the auditors be registered and that there is an appeal process in relation to that. I think those moves will improve the general assessment that will go on in terms of greenhouse gas monitoring under this legislation.