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

in reply—I thank senators for their contribution to the debate on my motion to disallow the Energy Efficiency Opportunities Amendment Regulations 2009 (No. 1). I am reminded of when I was first elected in 2005 and started talking about climate change—there was the same lack of interest then as there apparently is now in addressing the issue of energy efficiency. I remind the Senate that the people of Australia, because of the Rudd government’s decision, are to fork out $3.8 billion to coal fired generators as compensation under the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. What do the companies say about why they should be exempted from having to even identify energy efficiency opportunities? They say that being included in the program would unnecessarily increase business’s reporting burdens and the associated costs. Oh, dear! There would be a cost burden in identifying energy efficiency opportunities—when these coal fired power stations are getting $3.8 billion in cold, hard cash, supposedly as lost asset value, when anybody can see that moving into a zero-carbon economy is going to see these as stranded assets. As Professor Garnaut said, there is no economic justification whatsoever for parting with $3.8 billion to coal fired power stations. That is the fact of the matter. The Greens and Professor Garnaut see straight through what is purely a cost-shifting measure to the polluters in Australia.

I take umbrage with our colleague from the coalition, Senator Minchin, who says that disallowing a regulation which exempts polluters from having to identify energy efficiency opportunities is somehow an attack on the workers of Australia. That is arrant nonsense. It is not an attack on the workers of Australia. What is an attack on the workers of Australia is sandbagging the old economy and letting other countries bypass Australia, rendering Australia uncompetitive, without the manufacturing industry and without renewables in the future.

Today we see a classic case of that. First Solar in the US announced today that they are investing in the world’s biggest solar plant, in China. Why? Because the Chinese government has a feed-in tariff. First Solar said that was the main policy reason for going to China. What do we have in Australia at the same time? Solar Systems going into voluntary administration because they cannot raise the capital because we do not have the appropriate policy frameworks in this country to encourage private sector investment.

It is criminal. It is a crime against future generations that we have a government and a coalition refusing to bring in and support—I have brought the legislation in here but they could bring it in themselves if they wanted to—legislation that would drive capital investment in a new manufacturing sector, in jobs in the very regions which are going to be vulnerable. If they sandbag these old industries as they intend to do, they are going to see them redundant and shut down and see people out of work, and there is going to be serious dislocation when the world decides it can no longer tolerate coal fired power.

For the benefit of people listening and people in here, Four Corners on Monday night made it very clear that the nonsense of carbon capture and storage is not going to come to fruition. The United States government are not doing it. They were investing in it because it gave cover for ongoing coal fired generation and coalmining operations. That is about the extent of it. There is not going to be carbon capture and storage. We are going to give them $3.8 billion for nothing. At the same time, because it would impose a regulatory burden to assess energy efficiency opportunities, they will not do it.

I heard Senator Minchin saying, and the government more or less agreeing, that there are not the energy efficiency opportunities in generators and transmitters of energy. I ask the question: how do you know when you have not even asked them to look? You are not even requiring them to look. What is the excuse? The generators say that, because the investments in energy efficiency can only be made through investments in high-cost infrastructure, they cannot meet a four-year payback period—therefore, we should not do it. Well, there is a simple solution to that: we could negotiate to extend the payback period so it is a cost-effective investment.

Why should we give them $3.8 billion when the boards are not prepared to invest in energy efficiency, even if it is a cost to them? Ultimately, the idea is to reduce overall costs, of course. That is the whole point of energy efficiency—to reduce energy use and reduce costs. These companies also have the temerity to say that the Energy Efficiency Opportunities Program would not make any difference to generators’ plans for improving the efficiency of their plant or retiring old, inefficient plant. That is right, and that is my argument for saying that not only should they identify the opportunities but there should be a legislative requirement for them to implement those energy efficiency opportunities.

Rather than give them cash handouts of $3.8 billion, which is corporate welfare for the polluters, it would have been much better to say, ‘No, there are not going to be any handouts but we will look at accelerated depreciation for investment in energy efficiency initiatives that you might take in your business.’ It would have been a much more sensible way of approaching this to say, ‘We will help you actually achieve these efficiencies, because it’s better for the climate, it’s better for the economy and it keeps your plant operating in a way that is less polluting.’ But, no, what did we have? Those companies came here and said, ‘We don’t want just an exemption until 2013; we want a permanent exemption. We want $3.8 billion and a permanent exemption from having to identify energy efficiency opportunities.’ And the government said, ‘We won’t give you a permanent one. We’ll extend it to 2013.’ There has not been a single cogent argument in here to support a rationale for that exemption. The only rationale I have heard is that there will be compliance costs for identifying the opportunities. You would have thought companies would think, ‘This is actually a good idea because, ultimately, governments are going to require everybody to be energy efficient and, if we get in first and identify the opportunities, then we might come up with ways to finance investment in those opportunities so that we can be more efficient into the future.’ But, no, they know the political class in here very well. They know that all they have to do is come here and say, ‘Exempt us. Give us money and exempt us because we are the coal fired generators of Australia. We deserve it.’ That is all the rationale we have had. There is no argument for it. It is an absolute disgrace.

People will look back on this and say, ‘How is it that the parliament of Australia decided that it was a good thing to give the coal fired generators $3.8 billion even though the person the government employed to look at this, Professor Ross Garnaut, said there was no justification whatsoever?’ People will say, ‘Why did they do this when the only excuse was that it would be a regulatory burden to identify the opportunities? They did not even have to implement them.’ No, that does not matter. You have the government and the coalition—the Liberal Party and the National Party—saying, ‘We will exempt this sector from having to do anything in relation to energy efficiency.’ The government might well say, ‘The point is that they will have other programs which will provide incentives for energy efficiency at this level.’ Like what? I do not see anyone springing to their feet telling me what. It is because those programs do not exist.

What I am seeing here is a government and an opposition under sufferance. They do not even really engage on this issue because they know they have the numbers to continue to exempt those big coal fired generators from having to even identify energy efficiency opportunities. It is a disgrace that the policy people, sitting in their relative departments—whether that is in the Department of Climate Change or in Resources—are all happy; they are all hand in glove.

When I was here earlier I heard Senator Evans saying, ‘You might have put in a submission when the first consultation round was announced.’ Really? The first round the government commissioned, through McLennan Magasanik Associates, was to assist in conducting stakeholder consultations with organisations that have been partially or totally exempted from the requirements of the program. So you get a consultant to consult with people who are already fully or partially exempt and they tell you they want an extension to the exemption—in fact, they want that exemption to be permanent. So, no, Senator Evans, the Greens were not invited to give our opinion to McLennan Magasanik et al in that first round of consultations, because the only people the government was interested in asking were the beneficiaries of it. It was vested self-interest, and that is what this is.

It is really interesting. People will look seriously at the Prime Minister when he says he wants to take action on climate change. Every time we come in here you exempt the big polluters from the renewable energy target; you put coal gas into the renewable energy target, even though it is not a renewable energy; and you give $2 billion to clean-coal research—a direct subsidy to the coal industry—in addition to $3.8 billion under the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. On the day that the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme legislation was introduced into the House of Representatives, the Prime Minister found himself in the Hunter Valley, turning the first sod on the coal railway and the expanded coal terminal. Then we have a situation like this, where we cannot even get to first base on identifying energy efficiency opportunities. There was the refusal by the government to bring in a feed-in tariff on the very day that China and the US got together and built the biggest solar power station in the world in China, because of that legislation. The government here stubbornly refused to have a gross national feed-in tariff. One can only assume that the reason Australia will not move on the policy frameworks that will encourage renewable energy is that they want to hold it up and store renewable energy until they can get some sort of lifeline going on carbon capture and storage for coal, which is never going to happen. I would bet that First Solar, the US company, is full of Australian trained engineers, designers and so on who have gone overseas. There are the people in Solar Systems, which has gone into voluntary administration. The only option for a lot of the people working on that technology is to go overseas.

Today, I heard Senator Carr announcing his program to give money to researchers to try and bring them back to Australia and keep the ones we have here. What he does not seem to know is that those people not only want money for their research; they want a policy framework that will see that research rolled out at a commercial stage and actually implemented. They do not want to sit in labs frustrated with technology that is ready to go but is not funded because there are no appropriate policy frameworks. I have people ringing me from the Northern Territory because off-grid solar is now finished, because the government ended the remote renewable program and at the same time put a cap under the renewable energy target so that there can be no more rollout of large-scale off-grid solar anywhere across Northern Australia, where it is desperately needed. On and on and on it goes.

I assume that the government expect that, if they throw enough money into advertising saying that the government is doing something on climate change, people will believe them. But when people dig down into it—and rest assured right around Australia community groups are digging down into this—and find out that there was an opportunity under the Energy Efficiency Opportunities Act to actually save, as I referred to earlier with the Energetics report, 4.7 million tonnes of CO2, equivalent to the emissions from 700,000 average residential homes or one million passenger vehicles, and the government decided not to require those opportunities to be implemented and, further, also decided to exempt coal fired generators from even having to attempt to identify energy efficiency opportunities, they will feel utterly disempowered. What of those community groups out there who are working for collective community buys of solar and who are starting to do all sorts of things in their homes because they can save small amounts of energy and are trying desperately to do it? Why wouldn’t they feel completely and utterly disempowered by what the government and the coalition are doing here today? It is exactly the same under the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. If they work hard to reduce their emissions all it does is create the space for these big polluters to continue to pollute at an even greater rate. It is completely disempowering for individuals trying to do the right thing.

If you think you are going to sit there continuing to be disempowering, think again, because the youth of Australia are not going to tolerate this any longer, because it is their future. As President Obama said to the students in the United States, ‘It’s your future.’ And, as we all know, the average age of the people who worked on the moon landing was 26. These are the people who are going to come after political parties that have failed them by refusing to deal with the issues. As my colleague Senator Bob Brown said a minute ago, there is a report out there at the moment on the Great Barrier Reef which asks the question: is it already too late for the Great Barrier Reef? Coral reef scientists around the world worry about that, because they know that 450 parts per million is the tipping point for ocean acidification and that is the end of the world’s reefs.

That is a pretty serious situation we are in—near tipping points—but here we have our coal fired generators in Australia saying, ‘Of greater importance to us is the cost of the regulatory burden of looking and reporting on the energy efficiency opportunities.’ It does not even have to implement them. That is the state of corporate social responsibility, that is the state of ethical investment and that is the state of boardrooms around Australia. It is pretty disgusting. The people of Australia are becoming more and more aware of this as we speak and they are not going to tolerate it for too much longer. I would be encouraging everyone I speak to Lindsay Tanner and Labor. I will be speaking at La Trobe University on Saturday and I will be telling people to go and ask Lindsay Tanner and every single Labor member: ‘What is the rationale for exempting coal fired power stations from even having to identify the energy efficiency opportunities that exist for them, and what is your rationale for giving them $3.8 billion of taxpayers’ money as a bonus? Answer that and then tell me you are serious about climate change.’ They are the very uncomfortable questions that are coming the way of this government and this coalition in opposition.

Unfortunately, that is the politics of the industrial age. Fortunately, the politics of this century are with the solar generation, and solar generation does not give permanent exemptions to coal fired power stations to refuse to identify energy efficiency opportunities. I would hope that when this vote is taken in a minute there will be some rethinking here, because there has not been one cogent argument put forward anywhere in this place to excuse these industries and to exempt them from identifying energy efficiency opportunities. I would urge the Senate to think about their children, think about their grandchildren, think about the Murray-Darling, think about what happened in Victoria with the fires, think about the 400 people dead in South Australia and Victoria last summer and think about the future and recognise it is not with coal fired power and pollution.

Question put:

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