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

I rise today to support this censure motion of the government for its gross and systematic failure in the delivery of its climate change programs, including home insulation, green loans, the solar rebate, the renewable remote power generation program and the renewable energy target.

I heard Senator Evans, the Leader of the Government in the Senate, say that he would regard this censure motion with contempt. He did not take the censure motion seriously; he believed it to be a joke and that there was not a lot of gravity behind it. I hope that he will front the workers at Fletcher Insulation, Bradford Insulation and Loyastar Insulation; I hope that he will go and tell them, today, that they are a joke and that he will treat the censure motion with contempt. They have lost their jobs. They were called together in the last 24 hours and told that they no longer have work.

I happen to think that that is a serious matter. Senator Evans should go and tell the people who paid $3,000 to train as home sustainability assessors that they are now not going to be accredited and that they will not have work. I have hundreds of emails from people who have said that they borrowed $3,000 in order to get the training and to get the accreditation. People left well-paid jobs in order to go and do this because they thought it was a worthwhile contribution that they could make.

And then we had Senator Evans ridiculing the Greens because Senator Brown spoke for 10 minutes. Well, Senator Evans had better come back in here and apologise very shortly because it was a member of Senator Evans’s staff who rang the Greens and asked the Greens if we would restrict our time on this debate. And we agreed to that because we want orderly management of the business of this house. We agreed to that. Usually when that happens—when we agree—the government then organises the time with the coalition and with the other parties in here so that there is a proper allocation of time. That is what happened. So if there is contempt in this place then Senator Evans had better look a little bit closer to home.

I want to go through this, because the government is being censured here because its failure is systemic and has occurred over a long period of time—since its election, in fact. It has failed to take a whole-of-government internally-consistent approach to its climate change policies. What we have is one part of government advocating one thing and another part advocating another. On the very day that the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme was first introduced into the House of Representatives, the Prime Minister was in the Hunter valley turning the first sod on the expanded coal railway and coal export port facility. There was a very clear media management strategy: let’s get the press gallery in Canberra to tell people that the Rudd government is moving on the carbon pollution reduction scheme but let’s go up to the Hunter valley and give a wink-wink, nudge-nudge to the coal industry to say, ‘You’ll be all right; we will look after you. The Rudd government is not going to see any winding back in coalmining or coal exports whilst we get everybody else focused on a five per cent reduction in emissions.’

Only a couple of weeks ago we had the Premier of Queensland out there absolutely ecstatic about the opening of new coal mines in Queensland. The new coalmine in question will be exporting 30 million tonnes of coal to China per year—90 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions from China via Australia. And we have national emissions of around 600 million tonnes so we think we are doing great strokes here—a five per cent reduction whilst exporting to China mega emissions way in excess of any of those reductions here.

So let us look at a holistic, internally-consistent government approach to climate change. What we have is a case of spin over substance. In terms of all these programs the government has never seen an opportunity to transform our economy—our way of life—to a low-carbon economy. If you were serious about it you would be looking at system change—whole-of-systems changes in transport, whole-of-systems changes in approaches to the built environment, and whole-of-systems change to energy in this country. There would be transformation away from fossil use into the renewables and into efficiency. But we do not have that. We have boom and bust cycles managed by the government when they roll out small programs—a few hundred thousand houses here and a few hundred thousand there—that go for short periods of time. Businesses are given a signal that there is going to be a shift in policy and then, without notice, it is wound back.

So, whether you are in an energy efficiency technology business, a renewable energy business—whether you are an installer, an assessor or whatever else—you never know from one day to the next what your future is going it be. It is all dependent on government programs and government largess. It is not as a result of a system-wide driver. That is why the Greens have argued strongly for the increase in the renewable energy target to be higher than it is, but also for a gross feed-in tariff so that you get away from industry and people being dependent on government largess and the decision, one day, to turn it on and, one day, to turn it off.

I want to go through the systemic failures here. Let me start with the solar rebate. It was an $8,000 rebate but suddenly it was stopped and we went to a means test. People absorbed that for a short while and then suddenly there was an announcement that the program was ending there and then on a particular day.

What happened to the photovoltaic industry? People in the industry said: ‘I’m having to put people out of work. I can’t deal with this. I ordered all this because of the rebate program, and now you have stopped it.’ So the government said: ‘Okay. We’ll look at the renewable energy target. When we bring that in, we’ll put a multiplier for photovoltaics into the renewable energy target.’ The solar hot water people and the energy efficiency people are now saying: ‘What about us? What about these technologies? They were included in the renewable energy target.’

Then the government came along and interfered with a mechanism like that by giving the rebates and completely flooding the renewable energy target with renewable energy certificates from solar hot water and from heat pumps and from phantom RECs. That stole from wind power, because the people who expected to make money out of the renewable energy target and to actually get a boost and an investment signal were those in the wind industry. But, no—it just pulled the rug out from under them.

Last week Pacific Hydro, opening their wind farm in South Australia, said, ‘That’s the last of the wind farms until the government fixes the renewable energy target.’ In Tasmania, the Musselroe Bay wind farm is now stalled, and people are losing their jobs there—another lot of jobs, Senator Evans. You might think it is a joke to talk about systemic failure, but people in north-eastern Tasmania—rural and regional Tasmania—do not think it is a joke. The people elsewhere in Australia do not think it is a joke, either—$20 billion worth of investment in wind sitting on the sides because the renewable energy target has been wrecked.

What about the renewable remote power generation program? This is a fantastic program which brought renewable energy to remote parts of Australia and in particular to Indigenous communities. One of the programs affected as a result of the Renewable Remote Power Generation program going west is the Bushlight program. That was an innovative renewable energy project to increase access to sustainable energy services in remote Indigenous communities across Australia. The project has gone west because of the restriction on the size of the solar systems for which there is a multiplier to 1.5 kilowatt hours.

I remind Senator Evans, who thinks this is not to be taken seriously, that, without reliable access to fresh food, refrigeration, fuel and qualified technicians, Australia’s remote communities are left in limbo. These remote programs actually assisted Indigenous communities in accessing technologies that made their lives easier and gave them the kinds of support for technologies like refrigeration that they had not been able to access on a consistent basis in the past.

I will now go to the Green Loans Program. Again, this represents systemic failure. We heard Senator Birmingham outline some of it, and I have been persisting with this for weeks. The fact that Senator Evans thinks that this is a sudden idea of the Greens shows that he did not listen when I, supported by the coalition, put a motion through the Senate only a couple of weeks ago on the renewable energy targets. The government clearly took no notice whatsoever on the RET. They took no notice whatsoever of the work I have been doing on the Green Loans Program for weeks and in Senate estimates—not to mention these other programs that we have persistently gone through, explaining to the government where the failure is.

Not only do we now have no green loans, but there are many people who have not received from the government their report on their assessment. Without that report they cannot go to the bank and borrow the money. The government has said that 21 March is the deadline. If you have not gone to the bank and asked for your loan by then, you cannot get a loan. But what if you are sitting at home and you had your assessment six, eight or even 12 weeks ago, and you still do not have your report? You are going to be denied a loan because the department has not issued the report. Whose fault is this? ‘Ask the department, not us’, they say. ‘Ask the minister, not us’, they say. ‘Ask the government, not us’, they say. And everybody goes out there and says: ‘The problem out here is dodgy people. Somewhere out here there are dodgy people. It is all dodgy people’s fault.’

It is not dodgy people’s fault that minimum, nationally accredited training standards were not in place before the programs rolled out. It is not dodgy people’s fault that registered training organisations were not the only ones offering training. Anyone could walk in off the street and get training, not just the registered training organisations that were providing that training. And where were the auditors? How many auditors were out there on 1 July when the insulation program rolled out? How many auditors are out there with the Green Loans Program?

Even worse, now that the government has abolished the green loans, you can now get a sustainability assessment. But since you cannot borrow any money at the end of it at no interest, in a lot of cases it is going to cost you substantially to buy the technologies. You would expect the report you get from these assessments to be accurate and to give you the information you need to make informed decisions. Now, however, we discover that the government or the department—somebody—has been fiddling with the calculator that weights the various parts of the loading to determine what the calculator spits out at the end as a recommendation for your house. These changes to the calculator have been going on on a fortnightly basis. If you change the loadings, what you get in the report is different each time. Because of the manipulation of the calculator that is used when you feed in the data in this green loans process, the community has a right to ask, ‘What confidence would I have in the report, when I eventually get it?’

What about the 5,000 people who had paid for training and will now not be accredited? What about the fact that the department promised people that the government would pay to have their training upgraded to certificate IV? What about the assessors who went into this thinking they were going to have a job and are now being told, ‘Five assessments a week, and that’s it’? That is less than two days work.

And what about the companies? I am one who has been critical of the fact that the government entered into discriminatory and preferential arrangements with certain companies that gave them access to a booking system that the self-employed person did not have. Nevertheless, contracts were signed with those companies. For example, I know that one of these assessor companies has spent nearly $1 million for training assessors, setting up a call centre, setting up support staff and making sure the occupational health and safety standards are in place. That company is now employing 525 people in this particular program. That company does not know if the five-booking limit now applies to them as well or to their assessors—how that is going to work. There has been no consultation, and there are at least five companies in that particular position with the government.

So, does this constitute gross and systemic failure? Does it say that the Rudd government does not take green jobs, green businesses and the green carbon economy seriously? I think that is exactly what it says. I think what it says is that the Prime Minister takes the old fossil fuel economy very seriously. He gets himself up to multimillion and multibillion dollar announcements when it comes to coal railways, coal ports and coalmines. But when it comes to transformation of the economy in energy efficiency, in fuel efficiency, in any of these programs, then the government is not prepared to let go of the fossil fuel economy and allow the shift to renewable energy, the shift to energy efficiency, to become systemic across the whole of Australia—no way. It is restricted to management by a department that has clearly shown it does not have the competence to roll it out. That is why this censure motion says the government has not taken it seriously. It is all spin over substance. It is all stop-start, boom-bust cycles. There are many disappointed, unemployed people across Australia today, and people whose businesses are about to go bust—and I happen to think that is a serious matter.

This government is also about uncertainty—no long-term investment signals, no nothing when it comes to the whole energy efficiency and renewable energy sector. That is why we need to take energy and put it together with climate change and have all these policies managed in a department which has the competence to do it, a department which actually recognises the issues. Does the Prime Minister, with his Department of Climate Change, want to transform the Australian economy to a low-carbon, zero-carbon economy? Or does he want a department which oversees photo opportunities and announcements for election campaigns while getting on with the real business of an ongoing fossil fuel economy? Because that is how it looks at the moment.

The Minister for Resources and Energy, of course, is totally focused on Gorgon gas, on big new development—all in the fossil fuel sector. He is prouder with his coal-to-liquids project for motor vehicles rather than actually getting on with the low-carbon, zero-carbon economy. That is the tragedy: consumer confidence that Australia can move to this new economy is at an all-time low, even though community enthusiasm for it was high. I hold the Prime Minister responsible for that. These programs have been oversubscribed many times over, because the Australian community really wanted to do its bit for this transformation. But now people are afraid, because if they open the door there could be a shonky operator standing there saying: ‘I’m here to deliver the government’s insulation program. I don’t have to come inside; just sign here—this will do for an energy assessment; I’ll just send it in and get the money.’ We have had endless reports of people who say that the assessor did not even come inside their house, yet we have had other assessors who have spent hours and hours, and have done a fantastic job, and consumers say: ‘This is the best thing that’s ever happened; I really understand my house now and what I need to do.’ There is that unevenness of quality, unevenness of audit.

Somebody has to be held responsible for this, and it is the government—it is not just one minister; it comes straight out of the Prime Minister’s office. We know, for example, that all these warnings that were given by Minter Ellison went to the project control board, which had on it a representative of the Coordinator-General. They were told about the risks embedded in the insulation program. We know the government knew that it could not roll these programs out effectively in the time frame. They were warned time and time again, and none of those shortcomings were fixed in the time frame—nor were they fixed before the programs rolled out, even though they were warned about the problems beforehand, including the RET.

So this censure motion stands. We want a new department that is capable of managing these programs, and we want some real effort and competence put into it—not what we have at the moment: ad hoc, internally inconsistent and contradictory policy and program delivery.