Penny Wong (SA, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Climate Change and Water) Share this | Hansard source

Senator Brown is a very good politician and that was a good politician’s speech. It was a speech that was designed to try and inflame this debate. It was a speech designed, as the Greens always do, to try and convince people that they should not vote for the Labor Party, they should vote for the Greens. It is always interesting to me that this supposed left-wing party is quite happy not to seek coalition voters, you only want to convince people who vote for the Labor Party. Your real enemy, Senator Brown, has always been the Labor Party, and you would rather see Tony Abbott in the Lodge than a Labor government which has done so much for the environment and so much on climate change since we came to government. But that is a matter for you, Senator Brown.

The only thing I am going to respond to is the personal attack. I always find it interesting that you feel the need to do that, Senator Brown. ‘Penny Wong is a prodigious supporter of the destruction of native forests’—what an extraordinary inflammation of the debate without any factual basis. Senator Brown, it does you no credit in a debate like this where parties have negotiated with each other despite their divergent interests. We have moved amendments on the basis of those negotiations. We are accepting some from the opposition, we are accepting some from your spokesperson, Senator Milne, in the interests of cooperation and getting this legislation through because we believe it is in the national interest to get more investment in wind farms, in solar and, over the years, in tidal, geothermal and in all the rich renewable sources this country has. This is what this debate is about; you want to make it about Tassie forests. That is the reality.

I refute your personalisation of this debate. I refute what you have said. What we are saying is that we are retaining the existing regime, which includes specific eligibility criteria for the use of native forest biomass to ensure that only genuine waste from sustainable forestry operations is eligible to create renewable energy certificates. These regulations include a high-value test which is applied to avoid creating further incentives for clearing native vegetation.

I am advised that high-value processes include sawlogs, veneer, poles, piles, girders and wood for carpentry or craft uses or oil products. I am also advised that wood chipping, including for pulp waste, is ineligible. I am further advised that to date there has been virtually no eligible generation derived from native wood waste, although a number of power stations are accredited to use wood waste as a fuel source. According to the Office of the Renewable Energy Regulator’s 2008 annual report, approximately 2.4 per cent of renewable energy certificates created to December 2008 were from general wood waste.

I cannot recall how many hours we have spent so far on this amendment with the same—but now perhaps a bit more inflammatory—speeches from Senator Milne and now Senator Brown. We can keep debating native forest issues all day and ensure that this was another day where we did not pass this legislation. I understand that Senator Colbeck’s amendment has now been circulated. I invite the committee to consider whether we could have Senator Colbeck move that amendment now and have a cognate debate on this issue because otherwise I think we will have this debate again when Senator Colbeck moves the amendment. The issues raised by Senator Colbeck’s amendment are fairly and squarely relevant to the issues raised by Senator Milne’s amendment, albeit that they are clearly from very different perspectives.