Simon Birmingham (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for the Murray Darling Basin) Share this | Hansard source

Very quickly, the coalition supports both the government amendment and the Greens amendment. I think the government amendment was a recognition of some of the issues raised in both the majority report of the Senate inquiry and the additional comments. There are real concerns about this industry. What happens if systems are priced too cheaply is that you end up losing quality and standards. As Senator Milne has alluded to, it is a dynamic industry. We need this flexibility for the multiplier to be adjusted, but there should be a recognition that if you are going to adjust the multiplier you should equally be able to adjust the size to which it applies, which is the relevance of Senator Milne’s amendment.

I note also that Senator Milne has highlighted the very real problem that state incentives and subsidies, and schemes such as feed-in tariff arrangements, are impacting on this and add to the proposition that payback periods for systems can become very short and very profitable unless you have some flexibility to respond. Indeed, as has been discussed previously, some level of uniform application of feed-in tariff arrangements, be that having none or some, would at least allow these types of incentives to operate more effectively across states rather than the current hodgepodge system between the states that only adds to some of these problems.