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

I indicate to Senator Xenophon that the Greens will not be supporting his amendment (4). Senator Xenophon asked for an indication on his amendment with respect to the deeming period for air source heat pump water heaters, and I indicate that we will not be supporting that either. But I want to make a few remarks as to what the thinking is. The problem we have here—which, as Senator Xenophon indicated, I have spoken about endlessly and I will raise it again to put it on the record—is that we ought to have a national energy efficiency target and we ought to have national energy efficiency schemes which support that target. If we did that, we would be taking out heat pumps from the renewable energy target and putting them where they should be, in an energy efficiency scheme—and the same with solar hot water. You would actually be making a really sensible division in looking at the effort that can be achieved from efficiency and the effort that can be achieved from the generation of renewable energy. We do not have that regime—and we ought to have one. We would have saved ourselves a lot of problems if indeed we had that scheme, but we do not.

We are facing a conundrum here, and the government will really have to engage very carefully in the next few years. With the phase-out of electric hot water in 2012, there will be quite considerable competition between heat pumps and solar hot water. If you take away the support for heat pumps—which the gas industry would very much like—it would mean that you would bring on instantaneous gas in approximately the same price range as heat pumps. And, as this phase-out of electricity goes on, it will change the mix in relation to solar hot water as well.

There is going to be a significant change after 2012 in Australia around hot water, and that is going to play out in this whole area of instantaneous gas, heat pumps and solar hot water units. That is something that the government is going to have to look at very, very carefully. But I do not think it is appropriate to effectively give gas a leg up by taking away the support for heat pumps in the meantime. I think heat pumps have a fantastic future. The possibility of being able to combine heating and cooling from this technology, in refrigeration and so on, into the future is fantastic. There are big opportunities coming down the line, and I think we are going to see radical changes in technology in the next few years.

So I wanted to put on the record that my concern with Senator Xenophon’s proposal is the change in the mix that it will provide between gas and the heat pumps, but I am also worried about how heat pumps might crowd out solar hot water. We just do not know what is going to happen here. That is why I am pleased that we have a review in place as a result of the support of the chamber for the amendment I put up earlier. That will give us a better handle on what is happening when that phase-out of electric hot water cylinders takes place.