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

It is true, Senator Macdonald, that the irony of all this is that the most economically rational people in this place in an age of climate change and oil depletion are the Greens. We are going to stand here and help this government meet its bottom line by saving itself up to $8 billion. Those of you from the tax office that are listening: we are here ready to go on this. As you will have seen when you did the costing for us on getting rid of this, the Greens have made a substantial contribution to this year's budget by, as I said, improving the under­lying cash balance by $953.9 million over the forward estimates.

Those senators who worked with me back in 2006 on the inquiry into Australia's future oil supply and alternative transport fuels, which looked at Australia's exposure to imported foreign oil, can feel vindicated today because one of the recommendations of that inquiry has finally made it into law in this country and it will start to be a driver of change.

The G20 has asked every nation to identify its fossil fuel subsidies and to engage in a process of getting rid of them. It is lamentable that Australia identified, through the Treasury, 17 fossil fuel subsidies that we could get rid of but then the government redefined what a fossil fuel subsidy is so that, by the time we got to the G20, we had no fossil fuel subsidies in Australia at all. Well, we agree with the Treasury. There are 17 fossil fuel subsidies that are pretty evident and we are coming to remove them to improve the bottom line, to work with anyone who will work with us to get rid of them because we need to be incentivising the future. We need to get to the low-carbon economy.

We need to focus on energy security. Anyone who wants to maintain a dependence on imported foreign oil is, frankly, risking the energy security of Australia into the future. This has now become a much bigger issue than just the price of petrol. This is about securing our future energy. Everybody recognises that most of the oil left in the world is now owned by countries, not companies. Those countries are going to be exercising their geopolitical weight as the world gets more and more desperate for dwindling resources. It is going to come to a choice of which is more expensive: do you go out and try and find more oil in deeper water with greater risks—and we saw with Montara and the oil well in the Gulf of Mexico what happens when you get into deep water and deep drilling—or do you go the other route and say, 'Let's get off oil and go to efficiency and electrification, and not take those risks'? That is the choice we have to make. The Greens have made that choice. Let's forget all the featherbedding for exploration. Let us get into incentivising efficiency, transformation, new technology, innovation and real competitiveness. We are on the side of efficiency and compet­itive­ness. I really congratulate the government for actually doing this at last. I hope we can accelerate the rate of change, because there are 16 other fossil fuel subsidies. We are ready to legislate them and so improve the bottom line.