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

It gives me no pleasure to rise to speak on the Clean Energy Legislation (Carbon Tax Repeal) Bill 2013 [No.2] and related repeal bills tonight. In fact, what is being put once again to this chamber is a proposal to swing a wrecking ball through the Clean Energy Act and quite deliberately and systematically bankrupt the renewable energy industry. A short time ago there was a brief altercation in the chamber when Senator Back was speaking. I have a lot of time for Senator Back. I do not assume him to be a stupid person and I also do not assume that he wants his kids or grandkids to inherit the kind of world that we seem to be plunging towards. Nonetheless, we did see in brief debate and interjections in the chamber a really important microcosm of the way that the climate change debate has been conducted in this country.

Senator Back pointed out just one small example of the way that this argument gets conducted. He pointed out, quite correctly, that the sea ice around Antarctica is increasing and has been increasing for some time, as though that then gives us carte blanche to either disregard the work of the majority of the world's climate scientists or throw some confusion—and I suspect it is actually genuine confusion on the part of Senator Back—as to the fact that, if the planet is warming on average, how on earth could sea ice be expanding around Antarctica? For me, some very, very basic research shows exactly why this argument has become so confused and why the work of climate scientists is so easy to abuse for political ends or on the basis of genuine confusion. Yes, sea ice around Antarctica is expanding. One of the reasons for that is that the land ice, the perched ice, the huge volumes of ice perched above sea level, is sliding into the sea at an extraordinary rate and that is changing the salinity balance of the Southern Ocean, which is causing more winter sea ice. The fact is the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet is coming apart at the seams. As far as I am aware, it is not disputed in the climate sceptic or denier literature but is a straightforward fact that, since 1992, the Antarctic continent has lost 1,350 billion tonnes of ice. To put that into perspective, that is 1,350 cubic kilometres of ice that has slid into the sea—an average of about 70 cubic kilometres of ice a year.

What is happening in Antarctica is unambiguously a sign of a warming planet. The poles are obviously warming much more rapidly than the tropics. The Greenland ice mass is coming apart at the seams, and the fingerprints there are actually much stronger and more easy to read. There is in effect a runaway feedback loop occurring around the north poler ice cap, because the retreat of the sea ice and the break-up of Greenland is leading to, effectively, a reduced albedo effect along the North Pole, which is effectively now a mass of dark water soaking up incoming sunlight like a sponge.

What is happening in Antarctica appears, at first reading, to be more ambiguous—which is evidently what has confused Senator Back and many others. You have an expansion of winter sea ice which disappears as soon as the summer sun hits it. It is in part because Antarctica is coming apart at the seams. Right there in microcosm is, I think, a way that these arguments can be thrown into public debate for political effect to create an impression or a genuine sense of confusion on those who maybe should have just kept reading the next paragraph of whatever report was put in front of them. Seventy cubic kilometres of ice every single year amounts effectively to a sea level increase, just from that part of Antarctica, of about 0.19 millimetres per year. It does not sound like a lot and yet it is leading irrevocably to, at first, retreat or defence and eventually evacuation of most of the coastal settlements on this planet within the next 100 or 200 years.

The legislation that the bills we are debating tonight seek to repeal were written over a period of years—at the behest of Senator Milne; Senator Bob Brown; Adam Bandt; the country independents, Mr Windsor and Mr Oakeshott; Prime Minister Gillard and Minister Greg Combet—in a room with economists, experts in social and tax policy, experts in climate science and those with an interest in the business community. The bills that came through were not perfect but they were hammered together through a process of negotiation. They are what we see tonight, and the fact that we have to stand here and contemplate the unravelling of a functioning carbon price instrument—the only industrialised country in the world to do so—is almost beyond belief.

The permanent record will show, for as long as the Hansard records of this building stand, those who cast their votes, eventually unwinding this price instrument that transferred money directly from the heaviest carbon polluters in the country across to those who could least afford the increases in electricity prices, such as the pensioners and the people on low incomes who were compensated either directly or by way of changes to the tax scales. It is an instrument that transferred money into energy efficiency for business, transferred money into biodiversity protection and, perhaps most importantly, transferred money via entities like ARENA and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation into the industries that we desperately need to pick up the slack. That is what you are seriously proposing to unravel tonight, and I think you will stand condemned for that vote.

I kind of gag every time I hear Minister Hunt put the proposition that the carbon price is not working and that greenhouse gas emissions in Australia have basically remained flat during the period of time that the carbon price was in place. The fact is that it is trivially easy to explain exactly how deceptive Minister Hunt is being. The fact is that a large part of the Australian economy is not covered by the carbon price: partly agriculture, partly transport, partly other sectors, and emissions in those sectors are rising very steeply and have almost completely cancelled out the spectacular gains that have been made in the electricity sector, which is covered by the carbon price. Do you not understand that, or are you deliberately misrepresenting what is occurring? The electricity market is changing, the structure of it is changing, baseload coal-fired power stations—particularly the older ones—are being phased out and decommissioned or are on the drawing board for that, and new generators are stepping up.

As far as short-term peaking gas supplies—which we might come back to in a moment—wind energy is the cheapest and most abundant large-scale source of renewable energy. Then there is rooftop solar. There has been a massive and almost unprecedented expansion of rooftop solar PV. And now we are finally seeing the next generations of large-scale solar PV farms and, perhaps, most excitingly, new technological innovations like the Carnegie Wave Energy farm based out of North Fremantle, which has just signed its first power purchase agreement with the naval base in Cockburn Sound. There are large-scale plants like that proposed by SolarReserve, a company based in Santa Monica in California, which set up a small Perth office last year and were proposing to enter the Australian retail market. They have held very productive discussions with off-grid miners in Western Australia and elsewhere, and I suspect they are not going there to talk about parts per million CO2 in the atmosphere.

I do not imagine solar reserves negotiations have taken into account the 1,350 cubic kilometres of ice that have been lost from Antarctica in recent times. I suspect what they are talking to the off-grid miners about is whether they are interested in eliminating their fuel bills and completely changing their input costs. I repeat: eliminating their fuel bill. You can run off-grid mines on sunlight these days, colleagues. It changes everything. So, a big slow clap to the mining lobbyists who chased this company out of Australia—unbelievable! These are the mining lobbyists who are effectively attempting, through legislative initiatives such as the one we are debating tonight, to drive these investors out of Australia—the very people who are negotiating with some of their member corporations about eliminating their fuel bills and effectively taking their fuel costs off the budget and off the balance sheet. In exchange you get a solar asset, which is worth something. That is the scale of the stupidity in play around these bills. The penny has finally dropped, even in the mining community, that the solar industry can help eliminate one of the largest input costs.

So guess what is happening to solar reserve? No doubt many on this side of the chamber and on the crossbenches would be aware that Four Corners recently featured SolarReserve. They have just commissioned a plant in Nevada—a 110-megawatt baseload, or better than baseload, solar thermal plant in the high country of Nevada. That is being designed and built to cater for the peak energy electricity demand of Las Vegas. The peak demand of Las Vegas occurs at eight o'clock at night, and so they have done something slightly counterintuitive—they have built a 110 megawatt solar thermal plant.

That company recently established in Australia. Yes, they are talking to the off-grid miners about eliminating some of the most expensive distillate and gas prices anywhere in the world, because they are trucking fuel sources for large-scale mines and mills out to these remote sites, and they are also talking to Western Australian electricity market operators about on-grid plants. Here is what they have to say about the Australian government's renewable energy policy. Solar Reserve's chief executive Kevin Smith told Four Corners the company had been deterred by a drift in policy and the planned scrapping of the carbon tax. He said that that policy change 'pretty much took the life out of the renewable energy sector as far as large-scale projects for utility applications' were concerned. He said:

… other markets around the world are advancing. Australia is going to be left behind.

On the appointment of climate change denier Dick Warburton to chair Prime Minister Abbott's completely unnecessary attack on the renewable energy target, Mr Smith said:

… clearly … that appointment was made because they want to move back towards conventional fuels, coal and oil.

It is pretty clear that the policy in Australia is now being centred around big coal. The coal industry clearly have rallied to move policy away from renewable energies because they view renewable energy as a threat and want to move back to conventional coal, and that is why those opposite stand condemned tonight.

The coalition side of this chamber, acting on behalf of their financial backers and donors in the coal and gas industries, are unwinding the carbon price and bankrupting the renewable energy sector. I cannot put in language strong enough the contempt that I feel for those on that side of the chamber. The legacy they are leaving for their own families and for ours is that the coal and gas industries, in their attempt to maintain their incumbency in electricity markets that no longer need them, will take everything else and everyone else down with them—70 cubic kilometres of ice from Antarctica every year; try to keep that figure in mind.

An Australian businessman, Danny Kennedy, founded the rooftop solar company Sungevity in 2006. He could not make it work here and he ended up in California, not that far from Silicon Valley. Because of the availability of venture capital—obviously it is a larger electricity market and maybe there is also a more imaginative investment community; certainly in California at the time there was much more systematic policy support—they now employ 500 people and they have offices all over the world. Mr Kennedy says that Australia risks 'going the way of the dodo' and missing out on 'the biggest economic opportunity of the 21st century'. Is there anyone out there listening?

If anybody out there seriously believes that we are doing this to reduce the energy bills of low-income Australians, then obviously they do not understand the compensation paid to people. In fact, people on low incomes are overcompensated. If anybody seriously believed that those opposite cared about people's cost of living, particularly those on low incomes, the budget destroyed that myth. The deliberate damage they have done, quite carelessly, to people's cost of living shatters that shallow line of argument that they ran so successfully last September in the federal election and so spectacularly unsuccessfully in the Western Australian by-election in April. Mr Kennedy says:

We get stuck in quarry Australia mentality from the 20th century while the rest of the world is phasing out coal and trying to move towards these new industries and creating whole new ways of doing business and jobs which Australians may never benefit from.

This is because they are being driven offshore—not accidentally, not through careless policies, not incidentally on the way to some greater or more noble cause; it is deliberately. The government is bankrupting them because they are threatening the business model of the coal and gas generators. It is nothing more or less complicated or sophisticated than that.

Why would the government do such a thing? It is hard to believe, given the scale of what is occurring, but you might be either confused or ignorant or in basic denial, which I guess is understandable from a certain point of view, about what is happening to our climate all around us. You might be able to sustain the argument that it is on a sheer commercial basis and not through the application of ideology at all—and I am not one who thinks that those on the other side of the chamber are ideologically motivated, although it does amuse me when I am told that the implementation of a carbon price, a floating market instrument, was some sort of Marxist conspiracy. That is pretty funny, but I do not think it is ideological at all. I think what is happening here is as a result of a hard-headed business case. It is a basic investment decision.

If we look at who pays the carbon price—about 370 of the largest polluters in Australia—18 of the largest 60 emitters, about 30 per cent, are donors to the coalition. They paid for the coalition's election campaigns, they bought their TV ads, they wrote their damn slogans. That has come to about 2½ million bucks since 1998—including $305,000 from Woodside, a pretty big business in my home state of WA. They also had the highest liability outside the electricity sector to the carbon price—just under $172 million. BHP donated $135,000 and Rio Tinto $20,000 since 1998—both companies with substantial carbon price liabilities. They made a sensible business decision with an extraordinary return on investment. You are a disgrace. There was $878,000 from Santos, a quarter of a million bucks from Adelaide Brighton and $10,000 from OneSteel. Should I go on? I have probably made the point abundantly clear. That is why I do not think ideology is in play at all here.

The government's financial backers and those who write their slogans and pay for their TV ads see a threat to their business model, see how radically their assets have been stranded by an electricity network that simply cannot afford them any more. They have seen a threat coming and have taken control of the political executive—not this parliament, thankfully, but the Abbott executive—and written the government's energy policy for them: scrap the toxic carbon tax; the one that was going to wipe Whyalla off the map and the one that was going to be such a catastrophe for the economy. They continued growing on trend, or slightly above, after the carbon price was introduced.

The government made it up and that is why the line started ringing very hollow and completely and spectacularly failed the Liberal and National parties. In the WA by-election, the first electoral opportunity to test the lies and the claims the government made in the run up to the September election last year, the coalition's vote collapsed by another five per cent and the Greens recorded the highest vote in the history of our party in WA. The coalition should be a little nervous. I am not surprised that none of you can make eye contact here tonight—by your votes you will stand condemned. I am glad that Hansard are in here tonight recording—

Senator Edwards interjecting—

who will place a vote and who will be sitting on what—