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

The opposition will not be supporting this amendment. This amendment, basically, is very similar to the last amendment we just voted on. But I want to make it very clear that, if it were not for the opposition, there would be no certainty for the future of renewable energy in this country. It has only been Labor that has provided that certainty. That has been the foremost principle in our minds in ensuring that we reach the point where we are in this chamber. It is not a point that we initially set out to be part of, as the Greens try to paint. We were not ganging up. There was none of that, and Senator Waters knows very well the history of what has occurred here: the bipartisanship that was walked away from by Tony Abbott and by the government at the last election.

It is only Labor that has provided certainty for the renewable energy industry going forward. I know the Greens have their outlandish views on some of these issues. That is why, to this day, we still are in a position where we could have had a CPRS many years ago and we never did. That is not the position of Labor, because we know that we are an alternative government and we want to ensure there are jobs, there is investment and there is a strong clean energy future for this country. That cannot exist without a strong renewable energy industry, and that is why we have negotiated with the government to provide that certainty. After this has passed this place, there will be jobs created, there will be more wind farms built and there will be more solar projects built because of Labor and because of what Labor has done to ensure that we have certainty back in this industry.

I do not walk away from the fact that the government created this whole mess to start with. But I will make it very clear that it is only the Labor Party that has fixed it, that has ensured that we are in a position where we have reached an agreement with government to see that around 20 to 25 per cent of Australia's energy generation will be from renewable sources by 2020. I know that the government reneged on their bipartisanship, and Senator Birmingham knows it very well. I am sure he is feeling very uncomfortable about where he finds himself right now, because still labelled there all over his website is his commitment to 41,000 gigawatt hours of renewable energy by 2020. I went to it recently to see a speech that you gave, Senator Birmingham, only a couple of years ago, where you said very clearly:

It has been interesting to note the claims being made about what the Coalition will or won't do. All of it is simply conjecture. The Coalition supports the current system, including the 41,000 giga-watt hours target.

That is the speech that Senator Birmingham gave to the Clean Energy Week Conference in July 2013 in the lead-up to federal election. The bipartisanship commitment that he gave he thought, just like some of his colleagues, they were taking to the election. Little did he know that his leader had other ideas in mind—and some of his now ministers had other ideas in mind—to completely walk away from that after years of certainty and after building such a strong and robust renewable energy industry in this country.

Senator Birmingham, you may want to think about taking that speech down from your website now because it is something that you have completely walked away from. You know it. You have made it very clear in your contributions to this legislation and in your contributions to the Senate on renewable energy and on the environment. I think you are pretty much, at this point in time, in the same boot as Greg Hunt, who has also done a similar thing, when, once upon a time, he supported a price on carbon and, in fact, wrote a thesis on such a thing. He has now completely walked away from that.

That is what you get from this Abbott government: broken promises and a government that continues to walk away from its position and does not know what it stands for, does not believe the science, does not believe economists and certainly does not want to support jobs and investment. Labor does. Labor will always stand by science. We will always stand by jobs and investment. That is why we have entered negotiations to provide that certainty back into the renewable energy industry. That is what the industry wanted, and that is what they will have, and all of our states will benefit from it after this has passed. So I think it is a little bit rich for the Greens to say we have somehow conjured this up or ganged up to create this. We had no play in that. What we have done is the complete opposite. We have ensured there is certainty back in this industry to get jobs and investment and a clean energy future back into this country.