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

I am proud to stand here today in defence of the Clean Energy Act, the best set of tools we presently have to drive the clean energy transition in Australia. I have wondered, as I suspect many people have, what is driving Prime Minister Tony Abbott in the senseless and aggressive attempt to bankrupt the clean energy industry in Australia. This is uppermost in my mind, as Western Australia goes back to the polls on 5 April.

The Australian Greens have ambitions for Western Australia to be the solar state, and so the desperate and unhinged way in which Prime Minister Abbott has led his team in the face of overwhelming evidence would be bewildering but for one thing. Sometimes you hear people suggest that Mr Abbott has an ideological hatred for renewable energy. Why else would you hire someone like Maurice Newman, an outright climate change denier, to review the renewable energy target? In truth, I do not think it has anything to do with ideology. It is a hard-nosed and very systematic attempt to crash the clean energy industry, not because it is not succeeding in competing with coal and gas but because it is competing too well.

The coal and gas industries, the bankroll of the election campaigns of the Liberal and National parties, are driving Mr Abbott in this direction, and it makes a dire kind of sense. What could possibly threaten the incumbency of the coal and gas industries—technologies with decades of incumbency, decades of influence and powerful lobby groups with direct access into the cabinet room? I can think of something that would be a direct threat: an energy source where the capital investment is upfront, and then the fuel costs are eliminated. Gone. It is an energy source as powerful and limitless as the sun itself and as perpetual as the winds and the tides, or the practically infinite energy of the planet's interior.

Imagine, if you will, a solar power station a mile across running only on sunlight, able to generate electricity day and night. Now imagine the cost of this technology falling so rapidly that even the Commonwealth government's economic assessments are obsolete on the day that they are printed. This is what is driving the coalition's unforgivable attack on solar and wind energy. It is a hardline, last-ditch defence. It is absolutely essential then that we protect this legislation now, and after new senators take their seats in July. More than any other single issue, this is the one that is driving the Australian Greens' campaign in the West.

The fact is we know that the Clean Energy Act is working. Australia's carbon emissions from the sectors that are covered by the carbon price scheme are down more than seven per cent since 1 July last year. This is a structural and historic change, a shift in the energy mix away from coal towards gas and renewables. There has also been a decline in demand for grid energy. It is largely, although not entirely, being driven by the carbon price. We have the IMF, the World Bank, the United Nations and the OECD—not exactly likely members of this vast socialist conspiracy that appears to have infected the minds of those who oppose bills such as these—urging Prime Minister Tony Abbott not to abandon the price on carbon.

It is not only working but also making us more globally competitive. If you look at countries like Germany, Denmark, the UK, Korea and Switzerland, they have ensured that their competitiveness—if that is your primary metric and the thing you care most about—is driven and linked to low-carbon growth.

Clean energy investment has stalled since the announcement of the renewable energy target hatchet job on top of the climate repeal bills we are debating today, and there is no question that the practical impact of abolishing the renewable energy target will be to destroy jobs. In 2014, the solar photovoltaic industry employs 12,300 Australians across 4,300 businesses—the vast majority, as you would expect, being small businesses. If the renewable energy target is abolished, up to 6,750 solar PV jobs will be lost by 2018; about 2,000 of them will be lost in the short term.

When in opposition, the government ran on an election promise of an employment plan which would create one million jobs. How is that working out for you? Having accidentally presided over the destruction of thousands of skilled manufacturing jobs, you are now setting out to deliberately destroy thousands more. The Greens know that the clean energy future is a job-rich future. The following are the number of jobs which are created per $1 million invested. Five jobs are created in natural gas. This is because the industry is not particularly labour-intensive but is extremely capital-intensive. In the coal industry, seven jobs are created. In smart-grid installation, 12 jobs are created. In solar energy, 14 jobs are created. In building retrofits, 17 jobs are created. In mass transit and freight rail installation, which this government has also turned its back on, 22 jobs are created.

As a Western Australian, I am keenly aware that the debate on renewable energy risks turning into a caricature with the mining industry on one side and everyone else on the other side. But I know from experience that such an opposition of interests is not valid. In fact, I strongly believe that regional, Western Australian miners will be the first adopters of large-scale solar. They are not necessarily driven by the same motivation as we are, but that does not matter. They will act on the basis of the business case alone, because their survival depends in part on driving down the cost of energy against predicted steep increases in the price of gas and distillate which will blow the marginal impact of the carbon price out of the water.

Imagine if we had created an investment arm of the Commonwealth to help de-risk large-scale renewable energy projects. Imagine if we had created a grants body which had substantial expertise in the clean energy sector and which could help mining companies and other intensive users of electricity to transition out of gas and diesel and into the solar industry. Imagine if such entities existed. Then imagine that the government came into this place and attempted to wreck all of them.

Last year on 4 November, ARENA, which is one of the government entities I refer to, held a resources and renewable energy forum in Perth. The forum was hosted by the Chamber of Minerals and Energy of Western Australia and showcased the opportunities for developing renewable energy projects to hedge against predicted skyrocketing increases in gas prices and serious uncertainty about future increases in the price of diesel and distillate. A piece by Jonathan Gifford on 2 December last year in RenewEconomy notes:

Off-grid mining operations in Australia tend to have electricity supplied either through diesel generation or through gas pipelines. At the diesel-supplied sites, ARENA estimates costs of around $200/MWh to $500/MWh, while at the pipeline-supplied sites around $100/MWh.

A friend, colleague and sometime mentor of mine Professor Ray Wills, who is the former head of the WA Sustainable Energy Association, has pointed out that the diesel market alone presents a billion-dollar opportunity for renewable energy. He says:

"With over one hundred mine sites chewing 700 MW diesel a year, that’s a potential $2 billion market in WA alone,"

… … …

"The metric is that every 1 MW of solar would save almost 500 000 litres of diesel."

The companies who run these mines will be adopting the grants that are dispersed by ARENA and then stepping up to the large-scale renewable energy targets which are being supported by the Clean Energy Finance Corporation. But the government proposes to wreck the Clean Energy Finance Corporation. It is unforgivable.

The Greens understand that an electricity network running 100 per cent on the infinite power of sun, wind and wave is not only necessary but also possible now. Our Energy 2029 proposal takes head on the challenge to do so. What would it cost? What technology mix would be needed? What efficiency improvements would be needed? How many jobs would it create? The Greens did not write the Energy 2029 scenarios; we relied for them on the goodwill and expertise of the talented engineers and technologists at a group called Sustainable Energy Now. The Energy 2029 proposal envisages the creation of 26,000 jobs between now and the year 2029 in order to go fully renewable on the south-west grid. This would be a case of a state quite literally taking its power back. From the actions of a family in Girraween to nickel operations in the goldfields, Western Australians are going to install the next generation of energy technologies in coming decades and eliminate our fuel bill permanently. Energy 2029 demonstrates the profound truth that the clean energy transition will be much cheaper in the long run than the ever-increasing combustion of business as usual.

We know how to do genuine sustainability and prosperity on the scale of the household; but what about on the scale of the city of nearly two million people? The Transforming Perth collaboration, with AUDRC and the Property Council, represents one step towards meeting the large-scale sustainability and prosperity challenge. It is a blueprint for a city centred on fast, zero-emission public transport and built for people. We demonstrated through the collaboration that, by reorienting growth along just seven of the 18 identified public transport corridors, we could create more than 200,000 dwellings and build resilience, diversity and affordability into one of the most car-dependent cities in the world. The work of the collaboration builds on decades of determined and effective advocacy by people such as Professor Peter Newman and his team at CUSP and my former lecturer Allan Johnstone at Murdoch University, who has inspired a whole generation of students as to the sheer human potential of truly sustainable cities.

To bring the vision of a zero-carbon, sustainable city to life we need to build fast, efficient public transport. The Perth light rail project is the centrepiece of this vision. We launched the project on the eve of the 2007 election and found a huge well of public support. Working with people across the city—local government, in particular—and public transport advocates, we succeeded in persuading the state Liberal government to begin serious feasibility work on a light rail network for Perth. In 2013 the Commonwealth committed $500 million towards rail projects in Perth, including Perth light rail, only to see the commitment overturned by incoming Prime Minister Tony Abbott. Investment in public transport is essential both to giving the people the choice of getting out of the traffic jam and to cleaning up transport sector emissions. The good news is that it does not all have to be done on budget. Innovative funding mechanisms such as tax increment financing can get light rail built in Perth at a fraction of the cost proposed by Premier Barnett.

The Transforming Perth proposal imagines diverse, affordable housing clustered along rapid transit arteries and thereby allows us to rethink the whole question of housing affordability. In a city with some of the most unaffordable housing in the world, it is time we took on the tax policies which have deliberately inflated a housing bubble and imperative that we rethink the kind of housing we build—not just in the cities but also across all communities in WA. The Greens have developed a national housing affordability strategy that directly confronts the tragedy of homelessness and the precarious and terrifying place on the edge of homelessness faced by hundreds of thousands of Australians.

For a country increasingly edgy over the future of skilled manufacturing as this government presides helplessly over the destruction of thousands of jobs, look no further than the modular housing industry. This industry has the potential to provide thousands of skilled jobs in sustainable prefab dwellings installed in a fraction of the time taken to build dwellings using regular construction methods. They would be made from local, sustainably-grown plantation timber. There is a massive opportunity here, if we choose to take it.

Consolidating urban growth, as we transform Perth, has the essential benefit of taking the pressure off our urban bushland and peri-urban agricultural and horticultural areas. It allows us to step up in defence of our last remaining islands of urban bushland, and rebuild the links between them. This is the essence of the Perth Greenways project. As the city bakes in its own heat island, we know that shady neighbourhoods are up to four degrees cooler than those where concrete and sand dominate the landscape.

The government is trying to tear down the biodiversity fund—a $1 billion fund the Greens secured as part of the clean energy package. This is essential to buy back areas of high conservation value habitat currently under direct threat, including places close to home like Point Peron and Anstey Keane, Beeliar Wetlands and others. A combination of buybacks, community grants and a moratorium on further clearing of urban bushland is now extremely urgent as we watch ever more habitat going under bulldozers. The centrepiece of the Greenways project is that the whole network should be protected in the National Reserve System.

While we talk about high-technology transport options like light rail, we should also keep in mind the important place of the humble bike. The bicycle is, I think, one of the most elegant inventions of the industrial age. The Perth bike network is, effectively, broken. It looks in places as though it were written in Morse code—dots and dashes that appear on the map in no apparent order. For only three per cent of the state transport budget and a commitment of $80 million nationally by the Commonwealth government, Perth and other Australian cities could become the world's best for bikes. That is the essence of the Bike Vision plan that the Australian Greens launched in WA a little over a year ago.

Western Australia's population is overwhelmingly concentrated in the south-west of the state, but if you want to understand the future of the city look to the regions. Western Australia's rural communities are essential to our food security, economy, and cultural identity. Around 11,000 people worked in agriculture in WA in 2009-10, with Western Australian farm products generating just under $6 billion of revenue, or about 11 per cent of the state's GDP. Many farmers and pastoralists are practising sustainable farming but still face wildly predictable rainfall, poor returns, volatile world markets and extreme weather events as a result of climate change. That is why the Australian Greens developed a regional resilience plan designed to safeguard prime agricultural land from extractive industries; to increase substantially our investment in research and development—with $300 million—to assist farmers to stay on the land; to provide $100 million in grants for farmers to be more energy self-sufficient; to reform competition policy to serve the interests of community not just big businesses; to provide $85 million to help farmers sell locally and get a fair price; to invest in tier 3 grain rail lines, which are very important for the south-west of WA, to help our wheat exporters do the job that we need them to do; and to invest in the enormous potential of oil-mallee cropping—to put an energy crop into the rotation as a way, as well, of offsetting the devastating impact of dryland salinity in the Western Australian wheat belt.

These are the initiatives that the Australian Greens believe are most urgent for Western Australia. We will continue to advocate for them—not because of this government but despite this government, which proposes to do so much damage with these repeal bills and so many others.

Obviously, we could not do this work alone. Our role here, as political advocates, is backed up by a very deep well of support in the community. I want to acknowledge groups like the Australian Solar Council—the national peak solar industry body—which, just today, has asked Western Australians to vote to support solar in the Western Australia Senate election on April 5. I want to acknowledge the Western Australia renewable energy target alliance—an industry led body gearing up to save the renewable energy target from the senseless assault proposed by the Liberal and National Parties. Sustainable Energy Now is a group very close to my heart. They include engineers, technologists, practitioners, economists and those who drove and wrote the Energy 2029 scenarios for Western Australia.

But we know these decisions will not all be made in board rooms. While there are people designing the new platforms—designing the industries of the future—we also need to protect what we have. Farmers in Western Australia are gearing up to lock the gate against the invasion of the gas fracking industry that proposes to do so much extraordinary damage to our groundwater resources and landscapes between the south-west, the mid-west and Kimberly of Western Australia. People like Jon Moylan and others are stepping up to stop the Maules Creek coalmine and protect the Leard State Forest in New South Wales. These are all parts of the same campaign. The Kimberley mob is gearing up to take on the fracking of the entire Canning Basin by Baru Energy. The tunnel picketers in Melbourne are asking for no more than a substantial investment in public transport rather than more road building. And there are those undertaking direct action in Western Australia—those who will camp tonight in the great south-west forests—those of the WA Forest Alliance, including Jess Beckerling and those who are on forest platforms protecting these essential stands of native biodiversity, even as the impacts of climate change worsen across the south-west of WA.

All of us are in this together. These are the campaigns that will determine not just the make-up of the Australian Senate after this July but the kind of world inherited by people who were too young to vote in the poll of last September. Dangerous climate change, in my view, is already with us. The choices that we make in votes like that which we will have today, are about whether we can perhaps avoid catastrophic climate change. I would hope that the Australian government can get past the interests of those key financial backers and get behind this. I thank the chamber.