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

I rise today to support the establishment of a board for the Australian Centre for Renewable Energy; but, as the chamber is aware, amendments have been circulated and I would draw people’s attention to those. I will discuss those in the course of my speech in the second reading debate on this bill, the Australian Centre for Renewable Energy Bill 2009. Renewable energy is something that the Greens are passionate about. It is very clear that we need to make a transformation to a low carbon and then zero carbon economy as quickly as possible. One of the main drivers for that will be not only reducing demand for energy through energy efficiency but also creating additional supply.

I am interested in the remarks from Senator Minchin with regard to the renewable energy target. I regret that all the problems that have subsequently occurred with the renewable energy target were flagged by me in this parliament when the legislation went through. I moved amendments to address them at the time, to move the certificates generated by solar hot water heat pumps and the multiplier on top of the target, but they were not supported by the coalition or the government. All of the problems that I foreshadowed have occurred. Whilst I do support the government finally acting to improve the renewable energy target, I am concerned. I do not support a banding approach because it is essentially a restrictive approach. It will restrict the technologies, the large-scale new technologies, especially if they do not come on stream in time. It will restrict the whole process.

The Greens have argued that we need a gross feed-in tariff on top of a renewable energy target so that there is support for geothermal, for wave energy, for large-scale solar and so on. We need all of those things. We need a renewable energy target which will support wind and we need to have an energy efficiency target so that we can take out all the energy efficiency technologies and put those in a parallel scheme. But we also need a targeted gross national feed-in tariff with separate tariff ranges for all the new and emerging technologies—in particular solar, thermal, geothermal and wave power.

I would agree with Senator Minchin’s remarks in relation to geothermal. These large-scale new technologies which are more expensive than wind are not supported, and they will not be supported under the current regimes as far as I can see. I will be watching that very closely. I would urge the coalition to think again about supporting the Greens’ gross national feed-in tariff regime so that we can bring on some of these new technologies. They are more expensive than wind; I acknowledge that. But we are not going to bring them on unless we organise a regime that supports them and gives certainty to investors in those fields over a long period of time, and that certainty will come from a feed-in tariff because it is not going to be reliant on ad hoc government subsidies which can stop and start and be turned on and off like a tap.

I come to the issue of the board for the Australian Centre for Renewable Energy. The key issue is that there is a bias and a hostility across the energy sector to renewable energy, particularly intermittent supply. There is hostility and has been for a long time. When you get together people who have been involved in the traditional energy sector, they will all stand up and go on and on saying: ‘You have to have coal. You have to have nuclear as baseload supply.’ They have no notional view about distributed energy, about intelligent grids or about managing a whole range of renewables. When I think about what is going on in Europe at the moment with the establishment of a renewable energy grid across nine countries, I just think it is light years ahead of where we are here in Australia. We are not going to get that kind of forward thinking unless we get people who are supportive of renewable energy on the board of the Australian Centre for Renewable Energy.

We are not going to get that unless that board is independent of the government. The minister, Martin Ferguson, does not believe in renewable energy. It is very clear that the remarks he makes are gestures in the field. There is no commitment from the government or from the minister. In fact, he is far more enthusiastic about the expansion of Olympic Dam and the uranium mining there. He is far more excited about liquefying coal as a transport fuel, and carbon capture and storage, which everybody knows is a pipe dream. He is much more enthusiastic about those than he has ever been about renewable energy, and that is reflected in the amount of money that is spent by this government in carbon capture and storage, and supporting oil and gas exploration, the old forms of energy, rather than looking at systemic whole-of-government coordinated approaches to the rollout of energy efficiency and renewables.

It is not well known in the Australian community that there is currently an interim board for the Australian Centre for Renewable Energy. Why am I concerned? I will tell you why: because of the current make-up of this interim board, because as I understand it the interim board is going to be the board once this legislation is passed. I would like Minister Carr, in responding, to confirm whether or not it is the case that the current interim board will become the permanent board. Or, what will be the process for selection? The interim board currently consists of Graeme Hunt, who is the chair. He is a minerals and energy consultant and he formerly headed up BHP-Billiton’s operations in South Australia and was in charge of the expansion of Olympic Dam. Isn’t that great! We have someone who is a competitor to renewable energy—that is, the uranium sector, the whole nuclear sector—on the interim board of the Australian Centre for Renewable Energy. Why would I have any confidence at all that we would have a board enthusiastic about going to distributed systems, about managing intermittent supply and so on, when we have someone there at the moment who was in charge of the expansion of Olympic Dam?

Then we go to a few of the others on the board. Let me talk about Ms Emma Stein, who is on that interim board. She works as a non-executive board director, mainly in the energy, oil and gas utilities and infrastructure sector. So she is a traditional energy person. I have absolutely no doubt that she has very fine skills in that regard. But this is a board overseeing renewable energy. What expertise does she have in that particular field? There is Mr Errol Talbot, as well. Let me talk about Mr John Ryan for a moment. He is currently a member of the Carbon Capture and Storage Flagships Program investment assessment panel as well as being a member of the Renewable Energy Development Program fund committee. But he received his Public Service Medal for his work on the Prime Minister’s task force into the development of uranium mining and nuclear energy in Australia—another one from the nuclear sector on the interim board for the Australian Centre for Renewable Energy.

There are others, of course. I would have to acknowledge Dr John Wright, who is on the interim board. He has got expertise in this field. According to several of his recent speeches he at least has some expertise in the matter. I look at Professor Mary O’Kane. Again, she has laudable skills. She is a former Vice-Chancellor at the University of Adelaide and so on. She has been a board director. I absolutely do not question her skills in that regard, but I do in terms of her expertise on renewable energy.

Why do I say that is so important for people on the board of the Australian Centre for Renewable Energy? Because they are charged to oversee the Renewable Energy Demonstration Program, which looks at the technical and economic viability of renewable energy technologies for power generation through large-scale installations, support for the development of a range of renewable energy technologies for power generation, enhancement of Australia’s international leadership in renewable energy technology for power generation and attraction of private sector investment in renewable energy power generation. These are the people who are going to make decisions about applications for the money that is being distributed under this scheme. People who have no expertise in these technologies are going to be put in charge of overseeing the disbursement of funds for those project applications. That is unacceptable. It is why we have had failure after failure across the renewable energy sector in getting projects up. Consistently, the people who are appointed to government boards by governments effectively do not have expertise in the technologies they are set to oversee or, worse still, are actually hostile to or competitors of those technologies.

Why do I say that? Let me get to some of the other boards we have had in recent times, such as that of the Solar Flagships program. Martin Ferguson, the Minister for Resources and Energy, announced the seven-member Solar Flagships Council to assess the Solar Flagships program in February 2010. Dr Jenny Purdie, who joined Rio Tinto Alcan, is the General Manager of its business improvement technology for the Pacific. She is the Smelter Operations Manager at Comalco. There is also Kathy Hirschfeld, who is Managing Director and Refinery Manager of BP’s Bulwer Island refinery, and so on. And there are people like Mark Twidell who have expertise in the solar industry and Antony Cohen, who is the Chief Financial Officer of Better Place, which has a distributed notional view on transport but has nothing to do with large-scale solar power—but at least it is in the fields of understanding innovation in the sector. The rest are traditional energy people, including Mike Vertigan, who oversaw Basslink.

I do not dispute that these people have expertise in energy, but we are talking about the development of a new field. We are talking about investment in Australia and a vision for renewable energy, for distributed energy. We are talking about a vision for large-scale renewables, which will require intelligent grids to link up intermittent supply. These people have no expertise in that field, and they are the ones who are going to be making the decisions over Solar Flagships. Exactly the same thing happened with the energy white paper. You would think that if an energy white paper was under development it might include expertise in renewables if the future is in a low carbon or zero carbon economy. But, when I go to the committee looking at developing the white paper, who do I find on it? Representatives from Shell, BHP’s uranium division, Santos, Woodside, Rio Tinto, Origin, AGL, Xstrata, the Energy Supply Association of Australia and the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association. Of the non-fossil-fuel representatives, there are the Australian Energy Market Operator; the Chair and Deputy Secretary of the Department of Resources, Energy and Tourism, Drew Clarke; the Secretary of the Victorian Department of Primary Industries; the PM’s National Security Adviser; and the CSIRO’s CEO, Megan Clark.

The point I make here is: where, apart from government appointees—people directly under government control in ministerial offices of an energy market operator—are the experts in the field of renewables, particularly large-scale renewables and new technologies? Where are they in the development of the white paper? People afterwards will ask, ‘What is the rationale for decisions that are being made under an energy white paper? What is the rationale for decisions about where the money is going to be disbursed under the Solar Flagships program?’ People equally are going to ask, ‘What is the rationale for the disbursement of funds under the programs that this Australian Centre for Renewable Energy is going to oversee?’ That is my point and that is why I, on behalf of the Greens, am moving two amendments, one of which says that the advice that the board provides to the minister must be tabled in the parliament so that we get to see what this board is recommending to the minister. That is fair given that this board is supposedly independent. The explanatory memorandum says that this board will be independent. If it is independent, what is it doing having the secretary of the department appoint the CEO, having the minister then appoint the members of the board and having the board served by staff who will be employees of the Department of Resources, Energy and Tourism?

Here we have a supposedly independent body under the Minister for Resources and Energy with a CEO who is an ex-officio member and up to six other members who are appointed by the minister based on their knowledge or experience in fields relevant to the ACRE board functions. Please, let us have some people on the board who have skills relevant to this field; otherwise, we will have the mess we have had across the sectors, with the industry asking, ‘Why weren’t we consulted? Why doesn’t the government actually understand what the industry needs?’ This has been a problem with the Solar Flagships program throughout. ‘When is the department going to talk to us? When are people going to listen?’ The same has happened with the renewable energy target. Industry has been saying from the start that these problems would occur, and the government would not listen, and now they are expecting the Australian people to believe that a minister with a track record of totally and absolutely slavishly adhering to and promoting a fossil fuel economy is going to appoint to this board people who are genuinely expert in the field when we have an interim board made up of people who do not have expertise in the field and in some cases have expertise in a competitive field or are hostile to the technologies they are meant to be overseeing. You could almost say that it was designed to fail.

That is why the Greens will be proposing a second amendment. The first will provide that the advice of the board be tabled so that people know what the board is advising the minister and then what the minister does will be transparent—it will be apparent if the advice of the board is changed or ignored. At least we will know what advice the board has given and the rationale for it.

The second thing the Greens are suggesting is that it is completely inappropriate for this to be described as an independent board when we have the secretary of the department appointing the CEO from the department and the minister appointing the board. That is not independent. We want this to be a statutory authority; we want it to be independent. We say that, as is the case now, if you have a statutory authority the appointment of the CEO should be made by the Governor-General on the recommendation of the minister. At least there would be a genuine separation of powers going on. All we have here is Martin Ferguson and the government establishing very clear lines of contacts through the CEO and the appointment of the board to make sure that the pet projects of those board members and/or the government get up. There will be no independence and no capacity to scrutinise what is happening on that board.

This is a very serious issue because it is a crucial point in the development of renewable energy in Australia. I will be very disappointed if the coalition does not support these amendments, because they are designed for transparency. They are designed to make sure that we have an independent authority, as the government says it is supposed to be. It is also important that the people involved in the development of new technologies—those involved in putting in project applications for government funding—have some assurance that the people who are overseeing the process actually (a) are interested in the technology, (b) are not hostile to it and (c) may even have some expertise in the field over which they are making decisions about disbursement of funds. How absolutely disheartening for people with expertise, innovation and exciting ideas to put their projects forward and be judged by somebody with no expertise in the field and, furthermore, an interest in nuclear or old fossil fuel style technology who is determined that the new field will not work. I urge the Senate to support the amendments that I will be moving.