Scott Ludlam (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

He is still here, which is excellent. The Senate Environment and Communications Legislation Committee inquiry into this bill concluded that the bill is effectively discriminatory against one kind of power generator, that the bill will not prevent wind farms from operating but could in fact have an impact on electricity prices and that the bill involves the Commonwealth taking over planning and regulatory responsibilities that, in my view, properly lie with the states.

But the committee also concluded—and perhaps that is something that we can all agree on, although the Greens will not be voting for this bill—that every resident, whether in a city environment or in a rural area, should be protected from unreasonable environmental impacts by the operation of planning laws and guidelines. Obviously that applies to a much larger degree of industrial phenomena than simply wind farms. It is an important principle, though, and I would like to acknowledge Senators Madigan and Xenophon for bringing that forward, apart from the rather peculiar way in which wind farms have been singled out in this bill.

When the committee held the hearing into the bill, in November last year, there were strong feelings from people who felt that they had been negatively affected by wind farms. I draw senators' attention to the comments made by Senator and Dr Di Natale that those people should not be dismissed out of hand, because these symptoms are clearly real. People are not making these things up. But how we attribute the cause is extremely important.

Every large-scale industrial technology can be done badly. It can be done with poor consultation and it can have negative impacts on people. It is the case that wind farms have an impact. They are not invisible. They are large structures in the landscape. So there is a visual impact and there is a noise impact and there do need to be clear regulations in place about how to manage those. Ironically enough, I have never heard anybody in the wind industry, which I have good contacts with, disputing any of these things. We should study the impacts and we should learn the lessons. We need to acknowledge what exists in the medical literature and what does not exist. Most importantly, from the perspective of the Greens, we need to learn how to improve consultation processes with affected communities, whether it is for a wind farm installation or anything else.

The other thing from our perspective is to do with the placement of wind installations. If you put them across bird or bat fly ways, you can have impacts on wildlife. The industry has already learnt a great deal in the decades that it has been operating about how to place these installations well. It is crucial to learn the lessons and improve the processes about this technology, because this industry has such a large and important part to play in the future of electricity generation here in Australia and around the world.

We need to acknowledge another important report into wind farms, which was tabled in June 2011, from a Senate Community Affairs References Committee inquiry chaired by my colleague Senator Rachel Siewert. That offered another careful consideration of these issues. I am canvassing this history in order to underline the point that we must not dismiss these issues out of hand. I do not think wind farm developers should get a free run and be able to circumvent proper community consultation and proper planning procedures just because they are part of an industry I support. I think they should be held to the same standards of community engagement, public health and safety, and planning guidelines as other things—as we are so dramatically failing to uphold in the instance of the coal seam gas industry, the coal industry and the uranium industry, to name three examples that are close to my heart, where we see communities being assaulted, effectively, by invasive industrial processes that have very real and present health threats to those communities.

So the report that Senator Siewert undertook also adopted quite a sensitive approach to people who had come forward expressing health concerns and undertook very rigorous analysis, in particular, of the concerns around infrasound because those issues, in my view, had not been canvassed particularly well in Australia before that inquiry was undertaken.

So the Greens do take these issues seriously, but we also take the fortunes and the future of the wind energy industry very seriously because it is such an important part of our future. It has to be part of our future to mitigate the worst impacts of dangerous climate change. We already live in the age of climate change, and it is actually completely immaterial whether people like Mr Abbott and Senator Joyce believe it exists or not; it is occurring around them regardless. They can choose to adopt a policy blindfold and stumble around in the dark—I would prefer that they did not because of the harm that it threatens to the rest of us—but it is happening whether they believe it to be so or not.

Wind energy, as the most mature, large-scale renewable energy technology where economies of scale have long been an important part of the reason why it is being built, does have a very important part to play in the energy mix here in Australia. We need a zero emissions energy sector, and wind is clearly going to be a large part of that. In all of the studies that investigate how to achieve 100 per cent renewable energy networks, including the one that Senators Milne and Bob Brown and the member for Melbourne, Adam Bandt, were able to incorporate in the negotiations for the Clean Energy Act being undertaken right now into what a 100 per cent renewable energy sector for the national electricity market would look like, wind is going to take up a large fraction of the heavy lifting because it is cheap, it can be installed rapidly and the technology is mature. I would like to see a greater degree of local content of manufacturing and fabrication here in Australia.

Part of that is around the economics. Last week, my colleague Robin Chapple and I launched Energy 2029, which is a more fine-grained study than has yet occurred in Western Australia for how you would get to 100 per cent renewable energy on the South West Interconnected System—the SWIS—in WA. In both of the scenarios that we had commissioned, wind did a very large part of the heavy lifting for the reasons I have expressed.

As of February this year, wind is now cheaper than fossil fuels in producing electricity in Australia—