Anne Urquhart (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am very relieved to finally rise today to speak on the Renewable Energy (Electricity) Amendment Bill 2015. It has been a long time coming. Sadly, the government's failure to keep their word means we have landed in a far inferior position than the one that we were in two years ago. The government have held the industry to ransom. While I do not doubt that some on the other side would be happy to watch while the renewables industries die a slow death, Labor cannot accept this. For this reason, we have taken the advice of the industry and agreed to the government's revised target.

The story of the RET under Tony Abbott is an unfortunate one, and one that brings into stark relief the sad reality that we simply cannot trust the government to keep their promises. Before the 2013 election, there was no question about the future of the RET. It enjoyed bipartisan support, and both sides of politics recognised the vital role it could play in transitioning Australia to a low-carbon economy. In fact, before the election the Prime Minister could not have been clearer when he said 'There will be no change to the RET'. There were no disclaimers, no caveats and no mentions of any sort of a 'real 20 per cent'. But, very soon after gaining the keys to the ministerial wing, those opposite had a dramatic about-face. Earnest statements about the importance of renewable energy quickly gave way to mutterings about high electricity prices and possible oversupply. This is despite the fact that these claims simply are not borne out by the evidence or the expert modelling undertaken for the government's own RET review.

Of course, this was undoubtedly the plan from the beginning. It is a plan we have seen play out again and again in all number of policy areas. Clearly the government's pre-election plan was to say whatever it liked before election day, and do whatever it wanted after it had it won the ballot—never mind the fact that the latter bears no resemblance whatsoever to the former. And that is exactly what happened in the case of the renewable energy target. Within months, the government's rock solid-support for this successful—and previously bipartisan—policy evaporated, and the war on renewable energy began in earnest.

Other speakers here and in the other place have clearly laid out the benefits of the RET to the environment, to the economy, for power prices and for regional economies. They have noted the vital importance of the RET in reducing CO2 emissions and in allowing Australia to transition to a low-carbon economy. They have recognised the enormous benefits in terms of job creation in a sector that employed 20,000 Australians in 2014. They have rightly pointed out that not only does the RET not have any impact on the federal budget but it will actually reduce power bills for consumers within five years.

I will not go into any more detail in these areas. Instead, I would like to spend a bit of time discussing one of the most recent and, quite frankly, the most astounding comments we have seen on the RET. It came from the Prime Minister himself. Last week, the Prime Minister dropped the mask and revealed once and for all the Jurassic depths of his opposition to renewable energy—in this case, the wind industry. When grilled by the notorious antiwind campaigner Alan Jones, the Prime Minister did not hold back, boasting about government cuts to the RET and his goal to:

… reduce the growth rate of this particular sector as much as the current Senate would allow us to do.

Not only that, but the leader of this country even went as far as to say that he wished the RET had never been introduced.

This is absolutely astounding stuff. A sitting Prime Minister boasting about setting policy in order to shut down investment. The very same Prime Minister who, despite telling the world that Australia was open for business under his leadership, has presided over a dramatic 90 per cent fall in investment in renewable energy, and the same Prime Minister who admitted he never supported the very policy he took to the people of Australia before the election. So what justification did the Prime Minister give for his verbal trashing of the wind industry? Nothing beyond his own, very subjective belief that wind farms are 'visually awful' and 'noisy'.

Over recent months, I have gathered a reasonable amount of knowledge in this area, as Labor's representative on the Senate Select Committee on Wind Turbines

While it is undoubtedly true that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I think you would be hard-pressed to find too many people who would choose to spend time next to the belching, toxic smoke of a coal power station rather than a wind turbine.

Personally, I actually find them quite graceful, even majestic. And I say that as someone who has stood directly underneath quite a few wind farms. And, despite what the Prime Minister says, in my experience you could easily hold a conversation at normal volume, right at the base of a wind turbine. Unsurprisingly, it turns out that the Prime Minister has only ever been close to one turbine in his life—one turbine, which he used to damn a whole industry and, in so doing, put thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in future investment at risk. It is unbelievable. But the Prime Minister was not content to voice his own coal-addled opinion on aesthetics and sound. He went further. And in so doing he put himself at odds with the medical and scientific community when he asserted that wind farms have 'potential health impacts'. Despite what the Prime Minister and some others in this place would like you to believe, there is simply no credible evidence to support this. There have been 25 reviews across the globe into this issue and not one has found evidence that wind farms are detrimental to human health.

The National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia, our peak health research body, released a peer-reviewed paper in 2010, which found no robust scientific evidence to link wind turbines with adverse health effects.

Given ongoing concerns from some sections of the community, in 2012 the NHMRC convened a Wind Farms and Human Health Reference Group, released a draft information paper and commissioned Adelaide university to undertake a review of scientific literature on the health effects of wind farms, which came to similar conclusions as those in the 2010 paper. The most recent NHMRC statement entitled 'Evidence on wind farms and human health', states:

There is no direct evidence that exposure to wind farm noise affects physical or mental health.

Similarly, the Australian Medical Association position paper on the issue, states:

The available Australian and international evidence does not support the view that the infrasound or low frequency sound generated by wind farms, as they are currently regulated in Australia, causes adverse health effects on populations residing in their vicinity. The infrasound and low frequency sound generated by modern wind farms in Australia is well below the level where known health effects occur, and there is no accepted physiological mechanism where sub-audible infrasound could cause health effects.

Last year, Canada's national health body, Health Canada, undertook the largest ever epidemiological study of wind farms. The study incorporated over 1,200 households, living varying distances from wind turbines, some as close as 500 metres away. This $2.1 million study included a peer-reviewed methodology, medical expertise, self-reporting and objective health measures including hair cortisol, blood pressure and heart rates, and 4,000 hours of acoustic data. It, too, found no link between wind farms and human health.

In fact, there is not a peak medical organisation, national health regulator and/or national acoustics body in the world that holds the position that wind farms can damage your health, despite wind farms being in operation for four decades globally. And this is borne out by real-world experience.

During a recent hearing of the Senate Select Committee on Wind Turbines, in Melbourne, the world's largest turbine manufacturer Vestas testified that, of their service and operations workforce of 5,500 people across the globe, not one complaint had been made about the health impacts of wind farms. Despite spending eight hours a day, day in and day out, month after month, working in or around wind turbines, not one person complained of health problems. And yet our Prime Minister seems to think that he knows better. It is truly astounding that the leader of this country would go out in public and spout such unsubstantiated nonsense. It is even more astounding that the Prime Minister was so willing to dispense with the facts in order to further his vicious war on renewable energy.

The Prime Minister's comments are not only ignorant but also extremely reckless. There is a growing body of credible research which shows that exposure to anti-wind-turbine messages can have a significant impact on people's perceptions of the impacts of wind farms on their health. The Prime Minister's words will only serve to increase anxiety in regional communities and will create uncertainty in an industry that offers billions of dollars of investment and thousands of jobs.

I will finish soon, because we need to salvage the message that this government has made of the renewable energy industry. And we need to do it urgently.

In my home state of Tasmania, in my home region on the north-west and west coast, we could have 200 workers on the ground right now building the proposed wind farm at Granville Harbour. The wind farm has secured all the necessary approvals and even had investor interest, until the government broke its promise that there would be no changes to the RET.

Two hundred jobs might not sound like a lot in the Prime Minister's northern Sydney electorate, but I can guarantee that it will mean a lot to the people of north-west and west Tasmania. I would urge all senators in this place to think of the thousands of regional jobs that will be created only when this legislation is passed and of the thousands of potential jobs that may never come to be if it is not.