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

I thank the Senate for its consideration of the amendments. There are a few issues that I want to raise. Firstly, Senator Carr said this is an interim board. Obviously, an interim board ends when a permanent board is established; that is clear. He also said it will not be rolled over. What I asked was: will these individuals be the board? This is clearly a question the minister has avoided. Secondly, the minister said the board members need a range of skills—and I heard Senator Minchin say the same—and that they are not a lobby group for renewable energy. No, they are not. They are the board of the Australian Centre for Renewable Energy.

The board will advise the government on the state of renewable energy technologies in Australia, through knowledge of their own client base, on matters such as optimum collaboration and network models for renewable energy technology innovation and commercialisation; barriers to renewable energy technology innovation and commercialisation; prospects for collaboration domestically and internationally; and the impact of regulation, and standards, skills and training requirements for the renewable technology industry. Therefore, they need some knowledge of it. They are charged with overseeing the disbursement of funds going to renewable energy, and they should have some expertise. So I ask the minister: apart from Dr John Wright, whose interest and role in renewables I acknowledged before, which of the current members of the board—Graham Hunt, Professor Mary O’Kane, John Ryan, Emma Stein, Errol Talbot and Drew Clarke—have any expertise in renewable energy? Wouldn’t it have been appropriate to have as chair someone who has a background in these technologies? The current interim chair is a minerals and energy consultant. He was formerly the head of BHP Billiton’s operations in South Australia and in charge of the expansion of Olympic Dam. If you are going to have someone from an industry sector chair a board to oversee renewable energy, why wouldn’t you have someone from that background and not someone who has come from the nuclear industry, which is not a renewable energy industry but in competition with the very things this board is supposed to be overseeing?

I am not saying that these people are not of high standing. At no stage do I want to suggest that they are not experts in a variety of fields. My criticism is that they are not experts in renewal energy and delivering the advice the government is asking for from this board. That is my point. I will be very interested to hear what the minister has to say about the expertise of those people on the interim board. Also, when the interim board becomes the permanent board will it consist of the same people? If not, what is the process for appointing the board? The minister said a statutory board has disadvantages, that there is a lack of communication and all those sorts of things. Really? Infrastructure Australia has a statutory board. Do you want to tell me that Infrastructure Australia has problems with communication across the department and that it does not work very well, that we should not have gone down that road and that it should have been a little advisory committee on the side?

That brings me to the issue of independence. I have never claimed to be independent from the Greens party. The minister says that I would not want the party’s internal mechanisms, meetings and things made public. I do not claim that I am independent of the Greens party. I am not. And that is the whole point of what I am saying here. The minister says the protection is that the minister cannot direct the board what to do. That is right. But the board makes a recommendation and a report, which is secret, goes to the minister,. The minister then makes a decision about what to do, how to disburse the money, and that is made public. And we the community and the people in the renewable energy sector do not know whether what the minister has recommended is what the board recommended. We do not know whether pork-barrelling extraordinaire goes on in relation to which projects are recommended and which are not. That is the point of tabling the advice. If the government decides contrary to the advice it is given, the parliament and the community can make judgments about that and ask the minister why he made that decision.

As it is now, we are going to get a situation where the board will come before the estimates committee and the CEO will say: ‘Advice to the government is secret. I’m sorry, we can’t tell you what our advice to the minister is.’ So it is no use saying they come to estimates because, if they cannot say what their advice was, what is the good of it? You just get the minister saying: ‘I got the advice and these are the decisions I made. Full stop.’ It is a lack of transparency. No amount of trying to wriggle around it and suggest that a statutory authority is no good will work here because you set up one for Infrastructure Australia. It must have been a model you thought would work for Infrastructure Australia, and that is because you know that the community is fed up with pork-barrelling of major infrastructure projects and wants to have a degree of independence of the board of Infrastructure Australia. So I do not accept the minister’s suggestion that a statutory authority will not work. It could work very well.

The issue is independence. The issue is expertise. So I look forward to hearing from the minister which of these people on the interim board has the expertise in renewable energy such that they could advise on the state of renewable energy technologies in Australia through knowledge of the client base. We want to know what they know about all of these things. As I said, I accept that Dr John Wright has some of those skills, but I am hard pressed to see where the skills are in the rest of that board.