Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I just want to add to what has been said. The fact of the matter is everybody was happy with 41,000 gigawatt hours until 2020—everybody. There was no uncertainty. There was absolute certainty that that had occurred.

The people who destroyed the renewable energy target were the government. There is no doubt that the Prime Minister and the energy minister, Mr Macfarlane, set about saying that they wanted to destroy the 41,000 gigawatt hours target, and they started down this track. I have said previously, and I will say it again: the Clean Energy Council gave cover to the cave-in and it came when the AWU had their annual meeting and decided to exempt the aluminium sector. Then the Clean Energy Council said, 'Why stop at the aluminium sector? Why not just exempt the whole damn lot of them—all of the energy-intensive trade-exposed?' And so it went. And down and down it went, until they got down to their 33,000.

There was no need to remove anything from the 41,000 gigawatt hours. Everybody agreed that that was the target and they were building for it. The only reason the government moved to reduce the renewable energy target was that with a reduction in demand renewable energy was bringing down the wholesale price of power and undermining the business case of the coal-fired generators. That is as simple and straightforward as it is. There were 9,000 megawatt hours too much of electricity in the system. They needed to take it out. They could easily have taken it out if they had closed down some coal-fired generators, but there was no way that the Abbott government was going to close down coal-fired generators. We could have closed down Hazelwood. It could have happened. It would have been fantastic for our greenhouse gas emission target. It would have closed down Hazelwood. It would have led to ongoing construction of renewables around the country and lower wholesale prices of power. That is all good. What is not to love about that? It would have led to jobs and the rollout of renewables—the whole lot. But the one thing the Abbott government did not want was that it undermined coal. It is a simple as that.

That is why we are here tonight, and any nonsense about 33,000 gigawatt hours now providing certainty is nonsense. I say that because the Prime Minister went on radio as recently as two weeks ago to say that 33,000 was the figure not because it delivered certainty but because it was as low as he could get the Senate to go. If he could have got lower he would have. And what is more, his aim was to r-e-d-u-c-e, reduce, renewable energy—particularly wind energy. That is his ambition. How could you possibly imagine that delivers certainty? All that does is deliver another year of uncertainty, because who in their right mind would invest knowing full well the Prime Minister intends, as soon as he can stitch up the numbers in the Senate, to reduce it even further?

So let us just stop the nonsense. Labor were sucked into this process and has been wedged and done over by a crossbench and, once they woke up to the fact that taking 41,000 down to 33,000 advanced wind at the expense of large-scale solar, they are now into a game of trying to catch up. And now we have this completely nonsensical document, and guess who is being done over here? It is the crossbench. They do not know it yet, but I want to point out that this is classic. The government will write to the Clean Energy Finance Corporation to ensure it adheres to its original purpose, by changing the investment mandate to focus investment in emerging and innovative renewable energy technologies and energy efficiency. This will in turn increase the uptake of emerging technologies such as large-scale solar and energy efficiency, but because this crossbench does not follow this carefully enough, the government has recently given the Clean Energy Finance Corporation a different investment mandate. It has been told it has to increase the return on the money that it invests. This document says, 'No, go and invest in riskier, more expensive technology.' That is completely the reverse of the government's investment mandate to the Clean Energy Finance Corporation.

Does this now mean—and I would like clarity from you, Minister—that you have now decided to dump your legislation to abolish the Australian Renewable Energy Agency and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation? Have you agreed to abolish them, or are you dumping the legislation to abolish them as part of this deal with the crossbench? Or are you just playing with them like a cat with a mouse, not letting on that you have sent out this investment mandate that makes this agreement with them impossible to fulfil? That is question number one.

Secondly, if you have now agreed not to abolish the Clean Energy Finance Corporation because of your deal, are you now going to write to them and change the investment mandate back again, that says, 'You don't have to make that amount of money because we are agreed with the crossbench that we want you to now invest in riskier and therefore more expensive technology?'

Let us stop this con job, this absolute nonsense that has gone on here, where you are backing a deal that is equivalent to witchcraft. Actually, you are back in the days of dunking witches—that is where you have dumped the science. You are going around trying to have this inquiry and wind farm commissioners. You are investigating something that is not real at the same time as people are presenting with respiratory illnesses as a result of small particulate matter pollution from coal fired power stations. You do not give a damn about human health; what you are playing here essentially goes back to the Middle Ages. It is sad.