Penny Wong (SA, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Climate Change and Water) Share this | Hansard source

The government is not going to support this amendment. As part of the negotiations with the opposition—in fact, this was a proposition put to us by environmental stakeholders—we have said that we will establish a Prime Minister’s task group on energy efficiency which will report to the government next year on options for introducing a new energy efficiency mechanism. That might be white certificates; that might be another type of mechanism. I have raised previously with Senator Xenophon that the discussion I had with the International Energy Agency touched on the fact that there were better ways of achieving this outcome than white certificates. So the task group will consider and advise on the most economically and environmentally effective mechanisms that could be considered by the government to complement the CPRS and the RET.

I would make this point, Senator Xenophon: we should not think that these policies are cost free. I think your amendments impose on a liable party—I think you have called it a ‘liable scheme entity’—a requirement to remit certificates or deal with certificates. Obviously, if that liable scheme entity is somewhere in the electricity supply chain, there will be costs associated with that which would flow on, presumably, to the electricity price. That may be a reasonable proposition, but I just make that point in the context that the impact on the electricity price was one of the discussions we were having previously.