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

In the case of the minister’s arguments, less is probably more because the more you say, the more circular the argument becomes. A moment ago you were telling us that statutory authorities were inferior to the process that you are setting up and it had all these problems. I remind you that Infrastructure Australia is a statutory authority, which the government set up, and suddenly you do not have a view any more about what is superior, inferior or whatever else. The point is a statutory authority is independent.

I also note that Senator Carr did not respond to my request to name any one of the people on the interim board who have any expertise whatsoever in renewable energy except for Dr John Wright. As I said, I am hard pressed to see them—they are not there.

The minister also said that the chair was appointed because he has expertise in project management and finance management. I am sure there are plenty of people in the renewable energy field who also have expertise in project management and finance management and who do not come from BHP Billiton’s operations. We could have people from the renewable energy field as the expertise they have would be better because they would understand the difficulties of managing a project in a new field like renewable energy and would understand the difficulties associated with that. It is an irony—and not a reflection on the current interim board member—that there is not a nuclear project in the world that has come in on time or on budget. Inevitably, they are years delayed and multi-billions over budget. Anyway, the point of the issue is there would be people who have both project management and finance management experience as well as having come from the renewable energy sector.

I again note that the minister has said that it is not necessarily so that these people on the board will be appointed en bloc but that the minister will decide. I think that there is a high probability, given that the minister is not saying, that we will end up with a board that looks very much like this one and, I can assure you, I will be scrutinising that.

I am interested that the minister said estimates is where we will be able to discover the advice. I hope I will not be blocked in estimates with a response that says that is advice to the government and is not available. The point the minister makes is correct; we do not want technocrats making decisions. But we do want to know what technocrats advise so that then it is very clear whether the government has taken that advice or not taken that advice and then we know who is to be held accountable for any decisions that are made.

It is the issue of transparency and accountability and not that I want technocrats to decide. I do not want technocrats to decide but I want to be able to see. The fact that they are not going to be made public means we will never know. Of course there have been ministers who have been torn apart because of decisions made about projects that have been less than transparent. One only needs to remember the whiteboard affair to go back to recall that that has been the case. There is no saying that you will not have similar kinds of pork-barrelling with this particular allocation of funds. You will never know because it will not be made public in that time frame.

I also want to thank Minister Carr for actually putting on record the government’s contempt for divisions in which the government and the coalition vote together against the minor parties or Independents in the Senate. It will, I am sure, horrify the public to know that the government and the coalition refer to them as mickey mouse divisions. Because they are matters on which the Independents and the rest of the crossbench have a different view to that of the major parties, the major parties choose to refer to that as a mickey mouse view in the scheme of things. I have never, ever seen a minister actually own up to that in this parliament. I am glad that Senator Carr has now put that on the record so that the contempt with which the major parties treat the processes in the Senate is now clear to people.

I would also remind Senator Carr that in the debate on the renewable energy target, when I moved amendments to put energy efficiency measures on top of the target, the resulting division is one you would have referred to as a mickey mouse division. But months later, with chaos in the industry and a collapse in the price, as a government you had to admit you made a mistake and had to fix the renewable energy target—something you had the opportunity to do at the time if you had taken what the Greens had been saying as a legitimate contribution to the debate, if you had actually looked at what we were saying, instead of coming in here and just going: ‘Mickey mouse—the Greens have moved that. We’re not going to do it.’

I would remind you also that all really progressive, interesting ideas do not start out as the majority view of both the Liberal and Labor parties in this country. It is rare that an innovation will be accepted by the mainstream. It takes a long time to argue for that, and the Greens know that full well. The whole idea of moving to a low-carbon, zero carbon economy was laughed at when I first came here in 2005. There was no support for a whole range of measures on renewable energy and energy efficiency, but now it is mainstream. People recognise that such measures are an imperative. In fact, Minister Wong herself has said time and again that they are a decade too late; but a decade ago Labor were not moving for them either. So I am grateful to Minister Carr that it will at least now be on the Hansard what the major parties’ view is of the propositions put forward by the crossbench as amendments to legislation in the Senate.

I recognise I am not going to get a further answer from Senator Carr as to which of the people on the interim board of the Australian Centre for Renewable Energy have expertise in renewable energy, because it is indefensible, and I am not going to get an answer from Senator Carr as to how the community will ever know what this board has recommended, in the absence of any undertaking to make that advice public or provide it with any level of independence. However, I think we have made the argument and I commend the amendments that I have moved.