Lisa Singh (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Shadow Attorney General) Share this | Hansard source

I rise on behalf of the opposition to express our broad support for the Renewable Energy (Electricity) Amendment Bill 2015, with one clear exception, relating to part 4 of the bill. I do so out of relief—relief for the many thousands of Australians involved in our growing renewable energy industry, an industry that, thanks to Labor's strength, will continue to grow after the passage of this bill.

In doing so, I want to echo the shadow minister's rejection of the government's thin justification that this bill's changes to the renewable energy target will 'better reflect market conditions'. It does no such thing. The bill prevents the destruction of an innovative, growing 21st century industry. The bill gives the industry a measure of stability, and a platform upon which it can build and encourage investment. The bill saves the renewable energy industry from the Prime Minister's attempts to destroy it. It pulls it back from the brink, places it back on a stable footing, and allows further investment to take place in Australia.

Prior to the 2013 election, the renewable energy target was a bipartisan agreement. In fact, it had been a bipartisan agreement for many years prior—right back to the time of the Howard government. The coalition clearly expressed its support for the large-scale target of 41,000 gigawatt hours that existed in legislation before the 2013 election. That bipartisan support has been critical to the underpinning of the confidence of investors both here in Australia and, more recently, from overseas to come and put their money on the table for investments that run for, in some cases, up to 15 or 20 years. But, almost immediately after the 2013 election was won, the Abbott government binned that promise and began making statements clearly aimed at undermining and destabilising investment in the renewable energy industry in Australia—like blaming the renewable energy target for significant price pressure in the system, an opinion so inaccurate it must have been borrowed from Maurice Newman's book.

In fact, the government's own hand-picked Warburton review stunningly rejected the Prime Minister's thought bubble that the renewable energy target pushed electricity prices up and up. What the Warburton review in fact confirmed was that the expansion of renewable energy capacity in the system operated to put downward pressure on power prices, particularly wholesale power prices; no wonder the government has still not responded to its own review's findings.

The Abbott government has embarked over the last 20 months on a dishonest, manufactured crisis that damaged investments and spooked investors, with many of them losing confidence in Australia as a safe investment destination. It has been a reckless and damaging attack on the industry. It has been a broken promise that has set a bipartisan commitment back many years. The Clean Energy Council has said the crisis caused a cut in large-scale renewable energy investment in Australia by almost 90 per cent and forced many of the sector's 21,000 employees out of their jobs. This destructive and ideological policy shambles has not created jobs, it has not supported business and it has not protected the environment. Rather, it has risked and ruined thousands of existing jobs, destroyed thousands of prospective jobs, gutted businesses and places more pressure on our environment. It was as stupid a policy as it was unnecessary.

Remember during Labor's term in government between 2007 and 2013, Australia's wind power tripled in just six years. We were heralded as No. 4 in the world for investment when it came to renewable energy—clearly good for investment and good for jobs, as Ernst & Young's report showed. Perhaps that excellent statistic alone explains why the renewable energy target was attacked so maliciously by this government. We have seen, with the introduction of this bill, a Prime Minister utterly contradict the government's position that there was no predetermined plan or desire to cut the scheme, as well as the drivel that the government is a great supporter, apparently, of renewable energy. The Prime Minister's recent comments about the renewable energy target reveal clearly his ideological position against renewable energy, and in particular wind energy. He said on Alan Jones's radio program last week:

I would frankly have liked to have reduced the number a lot more.

He said:

But we got the best deal with could out of the Senate and if we hadn't had a deal Alan, we would have been stuck with even more of these things.

In that comment, he makes it very clear that his personal dislike of wind turbines was a reason to kill them off despite the billions of dollars in investment and the thousands of jobs and clean energy created. That is clear from his comments.

By contrast, towards the end of Labor's term in government, there were a whole range of wind farm projects and clean energy projects established with the support of the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, ARENA, and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation. When Labor came into government there were 7,400 households in Australia that had rooftop solar panels. By the time we left, it was more than 1.2 million. In 2013 in the June quarter, before the change of government, Australia, as I said, was one of the four most attractive countries on the face of the earth in which to invest in renewable energy.

During our time in government—during the global financial crisis—the number of jobs in this renewable energy industry tripled. And they were not just the core jobs in renewable energy; there were spin-off jobs such as in manufacturing. In many cases, manufacturers had been operating for some time, in places like Portland and Tasmania, building components for wind towers. Clearly, for our Prime Minister to make those comments, as he did last week, to make it all about his own personal dislike for wind turbines, and to make it clear that he would have, as he said, reduced the number a lot more if he had the chance to do so, shows that he is quite happy to see billions of dollars in investment, and the jobs that would have been created, go into the rubbish.

The jobs and investment created by the renewable energy target are critical. They are critical right across the country but very much so in my home state of Tasmania—a hallmark of renewable energy. Tasmania currently supplies more than 40 per cent of the nation's renewable energy. With further development, it has the capacity to utilise its natural advantages in hydro and wind energy to grow even further.

The Australia Institute recently found that the current net benefit to Tasmania of the strong renewable energy target is more than $100 million a year. That benefit will reduce along with other benefits that the RET generates— such as employment, investment in the renewable energy industry and the decrease in the wholesale price of electricity. The renewable energy target and associated policies have also been a roaring success in starting to bring down carbon pollution levels in Australia's electricity sector. That is central to the challenge we have as a nation in response to climate change, because electricity generation is the largest source of carbon pollution in our economy.

Unsurprisingly, given the termination of strong climate change policies and the attack on renewable energy investor confidence, carbon pollution levels have started to rise over the past 10 to 12 months under the Abbott government's watch. At a time when renewable energy investment around the world soared by 16 per cent and, in China, by 32 per cent, investment in Australia collapsed by 88 per cent. The rest of the world is investing in renewable energy, investing more and investing quicker. Costa Rica powered itself entirely with renewable energy for the first 75 days of this year and China's wind farms now produce more energy than America's nuclear power plants. Currently, China also has 33 gigawatts of solar power supplies and aims to add 17.8 gigawatts of solar power this year, more than double the capacity installed by the US in 2014.

Total dollars invested in 2014 saw Australia drop in aggregate terms, from 11th to 39th in the world, behind countries such as Myanmar, Honduras, Panama, which became bigger investors in renewable energy than Australia. That is absolutely shameful for a country such as ours.

In April, an HSBC analysis warned of the growing likelihood that fossil fuel companies may become 'economically non-viable' and essentially useless, as people move away from carbon energy and as fossil fuels are left in the ground. HSBC suggests divesting completely from fossil fuels and shedding the highest risk investments such as those in coal and oil.

So with all of that in mind, and like the overwhelming majority of Australians, Labor have great ambitions for the renewable energy industry in this country. From our point of view, the renewable energy target for 2020 and the associated policy frameworks, such as ARENA and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, are just the beginning for further investment and further expansion in renewable energy. Our very serious concern about the long-term damage that would be done to Australia's reputation as a safe investment destination, particularly in energy and renewable energy, required us to go to the table and do all that we reasonably could to restore investor confidence, which, after all, has been our overarching objective through this whole process.

This deal does that. This bill before us restores investor confidence in the rooftop solar sector. This legislation restores confidence in the large-scale renewable energy target and also provides full exemptions for emissions-intensive trade-exposed sectors. Furthermore, this bill removes the two yearly reviews, which I think we all now agree will provide much more certainty for investors. Having said that, though, it did not stop the government from trying it on, by trying to include those reviews to just create that little bit of uncertainty again in the industry.

The Clean Energy Council has indicated that the 33,000-gigawatt-hour large-scale target will mean that about 30 to 50 large-scale projects will be built over the next few years—and I really do hope to see those projects go forward—because it will involve about $10 billion in investment and about 6½ thousand jobs, no doubt to the Prime Minister's bitter disappointment, if his comments last week are anything to go by.

The Leader of the Opposition has indicated that, if we are elected at the next election, be that this year or next—whenever the election is—it would be our proposal to lift the large-scale target for 2020. The Leader of the Opposition has also indicated that we are already talking with industry stakeholders about post-2020 arrangements, which is the only sensible thing to do as an alternative government because, let us face it, 2020 is only five years away and if we are talking about ongoing investor confidence and certainty in this industry and are looking at the scale and the time frame of some of these projects going out 10 or 15 or 20 years, we certainly need to be looking at post-2020 arrangements.

The Minister for the Environment said in his second reading speech, 'The major parties have agreed to work cooperatively to resolve any issues that may arise with the operation of the renewable energy target to 2020.' Therefore, the opposition indicates its support for all those elements of the bill.

Now I would like to discuss the elements of the bill that Labor will not support. That is, the reinsertion of native wood waste into the scheme. Labor believes that this attempt to reinsert native wood waste into the renewable energy scheme is just a cynical, sad red herring that was foisted on government negotiators at the last minute and which they themselves put on the table, again, at the last minute.

We take the view that, in the modern sense of this scheme, native wood waste is neither clean nor renewable. The logging industry definition of 'waste' is not 'waste' in the sense of the residue—the leaves, branches, stumps— left, after logging on the forest floor. The definition of 'waste' or 'residue' that is built into the regulation allows for whole logs to be burnt for power production.

We are not willing to see native wood waste added into this bill. We know that the definition of 'native wood waste' would involve the whole of any tree that is harvested but not ultimately saw lopped. I note that 'waste' can be defined as any log that does not have a higher commercial purpose. In this way a pulp log, say, for paper production, is of lower value than a sawlog for sawn timber, so the pulp log is considered as waste, even when pulp logs comprise 90 per cent of the timber extracted from a forest. So like many of my fellow Tasmanians and indeed Australians I do not believe burning of trees can be the saviour of Tasmania's forest industry.

The cynicism of those who are now seeking to insert native wood waste back into the Renewable Energy Target scheme, particularly Tasmanian Liberals—given the damage they did to the Tasmanian forestry agreement and their efforts to enable logging and mining within the Tasmanian wilderness World Heritage area—quite frankly embarrasses me as a Tasmanian. As a state we should be focusing on a comprehensive, inclusive and long-term vision for the way we manage our forests, not this sort of last-minute, stopgap policy. To that end, how is burning carbon that adds to emissions the point of a renewable energy target? Tasmania has so much more to gain from the creation of more wind energy than it does from the burning of trees.

I therefore notify the Senate that, in committee of the whole, I will be moving the amendments that have already been circulated by the opposition—firstly, to remove the provisions in this bill that seek to reinsert native wood waste into the scheme; and, secondly, to amend the act to prevent any future regulation being made by the government to reinsert native wood waste into the scheme.

I support this bill in its broadest context but not the provisions in part 4 of the bill, as I said in my opening remarks, because of what I have just outlined. Certainly, we are not willing to see the renewable energy scheme used to provide an alternative to the hard work that was undertaken on the Tasmanian forest agreement by industry, union representatives, workers in the industry, environmental organisations and the Tasmanian and Commonwealth governments. Indeed, I think it is very cynical of the Liberals to try, at the eleventh hour, to use this red herring to insert native wood waste back into the renewable energy scheme, given the terrible damage they have done to the Tasmanian forest agreement during their short time in office.

I close my remarks by highlighting that not only is this situation that we find ourselves in one that could have been avoided; it is also a broken promise by a government that has form in breaking promises. That is why I commend the amendments that are to come before the Senate in the committee stage of this bill. I highlight the need for bipartisanship, going forward, on our renewable energy sector in this country so it has a bright future, so we can have investment, so we can have job creation and so we can continue to reduce our emissions.