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

I will take the interjection from Senator Birmingham. I trust that Tasmania, being such a laggard, can improve its position now that we have a couple of Greens in the cabinet. I certainly hope that is going to be the case, but I just use this at the moment, not particularly because I am a senator for Tasmania but, more particularly, to demonstrate to the Senate the range of different levels of support across the country. As a result of that, when you have a multiplier for the small-scale photovoltaic system at five and you have a cap limit at 1.5 kilowatts, you end up in a scenario where, in Tasmania, such a system installed would cost somewhere between $2½ thousand and $5,000, depending on the quality of the system and so on. In New South Wales there is evidence to suggest that, already, the same system would be free or almost free. We had a lot of evidence to the Senate inquiry, particularly from Solar Systems, Conergy and some of the big companies, that once you get down to a very small co-contribution from the household or it is free you get the same kinds of problems we had with the insulation program: the whole thing goes out of control and you end up with it being rorted. You can imagine how easily that could occur in this circumstance.

The issue is that if you do as those other companies suggested, and you increase the size of the system to, say, three kilowatts and reduce the multiplier to three, that would work in New South Wales, where it would still be a reasonable cost to households, but in Tasmania, as it currently stands, it would mean that the cost of a system would be somewhere between $10,000 and $15,000, putting it outside the capacity of an ordinary householder to be able to access this technology. This is a real conundrum and it is made because, in many ways, we do not have the kinds of uniformity we ought to have around the country. Nevertheless, I appreciate the fact that we have had a lot of discussion with the government about how we might go about fixing this. Initially, I was attracted to the idea of going to the three-three proposal, but having talked a lot to the industry they say that it is wrong to assume that there is going to be an explosion in free systems that we are told are already available in New South Wales.

It seemed to us that the best idea would be to give the minister power, through the regulations, to be able to monitor this scenario and to be able to change the size of the system and the multiplier when it came to the photovoltaic systems. This is purely to make sure that you get sustainable growth in the industry to make sure that you maintain your quality controls and you get a steady development of the industry.

Progress reported.

Debate interrupted.