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

I do not want to redebate an amendment that was passed yesterday at great length; I want to respond very briefly to Senator Milne. There is a dilemma inherent within the way in which the SRES was proposed and created—that is, that it creates an unlimited liability for liable entities whomever they are whether they be aluminium or industries that you want to rail against, Senator Milne, or mum and dad electricity buyers at the end of the day. There is an unlimited liability that is created under the SRES. A hard cap, as Senator Wong, you and others have rightly pointed out—and that I certainly accept and have heard the message loud and clear from the industry—on the number of certificates that can be generated would create an edge-of-the-cliff scenario for small-scale technology certificate generators that could come about every year or at the end of the scheme.

I think this is an elegant compromise because it allows the industry to grow. It allows the industry to have certainty. It allows the industry to know that there will be ongoing support and for the government to flag any variations to that support with some notice, one would expect. It also provides a capacity where you can at least respond to the fact that if that unlimited liability keeps growing and growing you can manage to peg it back somehow. That is all it does. It does not mean the government will peg it back. It does not really provide any certainty to those liable entities in some sense but it provides a hope that the government will, within some parameters of six million certificates, respond to that. This was the No. 1 issue raised during the Senate inquiry. Submission after submission highlighted concern about that unlimited liability.

That is what the initial amendment sought to do. It has passed, so I do not want to go on about it, but it was not the case that we wanted to put uncertainty into the renewables sector. That is why I said I thought it was an elegant solution. It provides a capacity to vary the price without capping certificate numbers and allows them to get on with advancing their technology in a slightly more responsive scheme than the one that was proposed with a fixed price.