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

by leave—I move:

That the Senate take note of the report of the Joint Select Committee on Australia’s Clean Energy Future Legislation—Advisory report on the Clean Energy bills and the Steel Transformation Plan Bill 2011.

We have just heard a discussion about a coalition committee report on the Clean Energy bills. What would not have been obvious to people is that the Senate Select Committee on Scrutiny of New Taxes is not a standing committee of the parliament; it is a select committee dominated by coalition members and it reflects the coalition view on this matter.

I wish to address the report of the Joint Select Committee on Australia's Clean Energy Future Legislation, which actually looked at the Clean Energy bills, not the fantasy put forward by the opposition, the hypothesis that they went around to try to prove. This committee actually looked at the bills. We had hearings here in Canberra, then in Melbourne and then in Sydney. This joint house committee was made up of members of the coalition, the government and the Greens and Independent members of the federal parliament. It specifically looked at the bills. The extraordinary thing is that when the coalition were asked to engage on these bills with the witnesses it became obvious that, after months and months of just the 30-second grab and the diatribe, they were not actually across the detail of the bills. They did not know what to ask the witnesses. They were largely ineffectual and in many cases, when we finally got to the Sydney hearing, most of them were not present.

I want to talk about what actually happened, because the real story out of this investigation of the joint house committee is that the overwhelming majority of witnesses support the package and came along to say so. Contrary to the advice we have just heard from Senator Cormann, we had, for example, the Investor Group on Climate Change, which is a group of large-scale investors, including superannuation funds, which control billions of dollars of finance in Australia. They came along to say that what business needs is certainty. They believe that this set of bills provides the certainty that will unlock significant amounts of investment, particularly in the energy sector. It has been the uncertainty in the energy sector that has led to increased prices in electricity around the country over the last few years as old infrastructure has been patched up and extended while people waited to see what direction this country was going to take.

We had everyone from the Investor Group on Climate Change through to big companies like AGL coming before the joint house committee saying: 'Yes, we support the Clean Energy package. Yes, we support emissions trading.' Interestingly, AGL said that it was the coalition's threat to repeal the bills that was a billion-dollar dead weight on the Australian economy. How interesting is that? I pursued that with them and said, 'Do you mean just the threat of repealing the bills is a billion-dollar dead weight on the economy?' They said: 'Yes, because it is increasing the cost of finance. Business needs certainty, and the coalition going around threatening to repeal the bills is leading to more expensive finance for everybody in the sector.' So let it not be said that people are out there saying that these bills are going to undermine confidence in rural and regional Australia. Quite the contrary.

That brings us to the Steel Transformation Plan, which is coming to a vote in the House of Representatives. The coalition went to South Australia and to the Illawarra and told people there that Whyalla would be transformed into a dust bowl and that thousands of jobs would be lost in the Illawarra. Now, there is a plan on the table to actually get OneSteel and BlueScope through the next few years and make them more sustainable so that they can take advantage of the clean energy revolution, which will be financed in part in this country because of the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, which we are also facilitating here. What better solution than to have Australian steel going into Australian made wind turbines, going into wind-turbine towers, going into solar-thermal and going into a very fast train in Australia, with OneSteel producing the sleepers and so on? This is a good news story. If you move to a low-carbon economy you make the steel industry more sustainable in the face of international competition and the higher dollar and so on. It is the coalition who are now saying that there will be jobs lost in regional Australia. They are voting against the Steel Transformation Plan, which puts $300 million in during the next few years to try to sustain a steel industry in Australia and make it more environmentally effective and efficient and will also maintain jobs. Let that be on the record. For all the ranting about the loss of jobs in rural and regional Australia, you can point to one place, and that is the coalition.

During the discussion on these bills, when people came before the committee we were congratulated as a committee for the effort and consideration that had gone into the bills that are complementary to this package, like the Carbon Farming Initiative. It was recognised that that will bring significant investment to rural and regional Australia. Local government in particular recognised that this is an opportunity for them, not to mention Indigenous and remote communities, which saw big opportunities with the Carbon Farming Initiative in terms of creating jobs.

Going on to some of the recommendations of the joint committee report, one recommendation was that the Senate and the House of Representatives pass the Clean Energy Bill, and the other 17 bills in the Clean Energy package, and the Steel Transformation Plan Bill. Secondly, it recommended that the government examine the proposals made by LPG Australia concerning the treatment of LPG under the mechanism and, where appropriate, refine the provisions to ensure that a carbon price is most efficiently applied to all users of LPG. Contrary to what the coalition is saying, LPG were begging to get into the scheme. A number of industries are now saying that they want to opt in. They said they do not want to be charged an excise; they want to be able to opt in so that they can leverage and hedge more appropriately. They are asking that the bills be changed to enable LPG to come in, particularly where it competes with other forms of stationary energy use. But one of the other areas that was raised was in relation to synthetic greenhouse gases and in particular the Green Cooling Association's recommendations. This is another really important issue. How do we stop the release of refrigerants, these cooling agents, when old fridges and the like are dumped and crushed? How do we go about making sure that there is an incentive for people to reclaim and deal with these pollutants rather let them go into the atmosphere? That is something that the government should take up separately to this set of bills. I have not been impressed to date by the Department of Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities. They have failed to address how we can make this happen. I put the government on notice here that this is something that we want dealt with. The synthetic greenhouse gases are very powerful gases and we need to act on those.

The other recommendation was that the government intensify its efforts to promote awareness and understanding of the mechanism by working with the Clean Energy Regulator to provide information and guidance to liable entities about the mechanism and compliance with it in good time for the start of the mechanism on 1 July 2012. It is very clear that we need to put more effort into educating people about how the carbon price will be applied to the large polluters—those who pollute more than 25,000 tonnes—and how it will be managed.

Needless to say, the overwhelming story out of these hearings was that those who have opposed the carbon price to date could not find major flaws with the package. The coal industry could not do that, the chambers of commerce could not do that and the Minerals Council of Australia could not do that. Frankly, they came before the committee with a mantra of opposition but they could not nominate any major flaws in the bills. That was very reassuring, as I am one of the people who worked on the Multi-Party Climate Change Committee to design this package. (Time expired)

Simon Birmingham (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for the Murray Darling Basin) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to take note of this Joint Select Committee on Australia's Clean Energy Future Legislation advisory report on the clean energy bills and the Steel Transformation Plan Bill 2011. I am pleased to speak after Senator Milne because after listening to her you would be forgiven for believing that this inquiry and this process was one of sweetness, light and harmony, that there was great general agreement and that it was all conducted in the spirit of proper parliamentary scrutiny. But unfortunately that is not the case. This was in fact the most farcical of inquiries into and the most farcical of parliamentary processes about the most sweeping of legislative reforms.

In the other place they have just voted, I understand, on 19 bills comprising 1,100 pages or more of legislation. These 19 bills are meant to have been assessed by this one report. Senator Milne is correct that this was a report by a joint select committee, but it was a select committee that was given just three weeks to undertake this inquiry. It reported on Friday to not just this chamber but the House of Representatives, who have voted on this legislation just today—such has been the rushed process of this amazingly huge package, with its enormous impacts on every aspect of the Australian economy and Australian life.

So we had an inquiry with a farcical time line that had to report in a ridiculously short period of time. Then there is the membership of this inquiry. Senator Milne had the gall to attack the membership of Senator Cormann's inquiry, which took months to consider aspects of the carbon tax proposal and had the opportunity to do so in far more detail than this committee. Senator Cormann's committee, the Senate Select Committee on Scrutiny of New Taxes, had places on it for crossbenchers, including the Greens, as I understand it, who refused to take up their position on Senator Cormann's committee inquiry. This committee, however, was structured with nine members from either the Labor Party, the Greens or the Independents, all of whom were supporters of the carbon tax package to start with. The Greens and the Independent member sat around the multiparty committee table drafting this package with the government, so nine members of this committee were integral to the drafting of the package. That compares with five coalition members. The committee had a Labor chair and a Greens deputy chair, contrary to the usual practices of this place. So for Senator Milne to stand here and criticise Senator Cormann's detailed and thorough analysis of the carbon tax when compared with the rushed approach of this very stacked committee beggars belief.

Let us look at submissions. Despite there being just six days for the Australian public to have a chance to make submissions about these more than 1,100 pages of legislation we saw more than 4,500 people respond and do so. Over 4,500 Australians made submissions to this inquiry in just the six days that they were given to get them in. Tragically, because of the limited resources available in such a short period of time to consider these submissions, it was the case that very few of them were accepted as submissions. Despite the arguing of the coalition, the Labor and Greens majority joined up to ensure that most Australians were silenced in this.

However, I am pleased that throughout the coalition dissenting report we have done our best to go through the thousands of submissions that were not accepted as submissions and that were not published on the parliamentary website. We have quoted from them extensively in the 134 pages of the coalition's dissenting report to ensure that the voices of all of those Australians were heard, because they were certainly not heard during the hearings.

Senator Milne talked about the coalition having gone to South Australia and to the Illawarra and elsewhere to talk about the steel industry. This committee certainly did not go to any of those place. This committee did not get out of the Melbourne-Sydney-Canberra triangle. Despite requests from the coalition to have hearings in a regional centre like Mackay or in the Illawarra or in Perth so as to hear from those on the other side of the country, all of those efforts were blocked as the government sought to keep the tightest of control on who appeared at this committee, who gave evidence and who had the opportunity to have a say on this carbon tax legislation. It was indeed a farcical inquiry.

I am reminded of a statement from a previous opposition dissenting report to this place that we quoted in our dissenting report. It said:

It is outrageous that only one week was allowed for the committee to receive submissions … To make matters worse, hearings were scheduled in the week following the closing date for submissions, which did not allow enough time for the committee to properly consider the more than 5000 submissions received.

That of course was the report of Labor dissenting senators on the Work Choices inquiry. Those words were correct then; they are correct now. The only problem is that they are correct about the Labor government's handling of this legislation and their consideration of a fundamental reform. This shows the hypocrisy that reigns amongst those opposite. But that is hardly surprising, given that, as this report highlights, the entire carbon tax package examined in this report is built on a lie, the mistruth that the Prime Minister took to the last election that there would be no carbon tax under the government she led. There is no getting away from that as a key issue that drove the enormous response, the enormous reaction of Australians, to this inquiry and saw more than 4½ thousand of them make submissions and argue passionately against this tax, argue passionately about the ramifications of this tax or at the very least argue passionately that they wanted a say on this tax. That is of course fundamental to this. They want a say on this tax. That is what they have been denied, but it is what the coalition is intent upon giving them.

The coalition also highlights in this report just how out of step with the rest of the world this proposal risks making Australia. We have highlighted the range of action that is or is not being taken in other countries, but certainly it is a reality that, overwhelmingly, countries are not applying a carbon-pricing regime anything like either the tax that applies in the first years of this legislation or the trading scheme that applies in the latter years of this legislation. We have highlighted that, even in World Bank surveys of global carbon market participants, 90 per cent of respondents indicate that they do not believe there will be a legally binding treaty in place to deal with global emissions anytime soon. So we will see the perverse situation where next year, in 2012, when the first commitment period of the Kyoto protocol expires, Australia will go in the opposite direction to the rest of the world and actually apply a carbon tax for the first time. We will enter a period next year when there will be no ongoing globally binding treaty in place and Australia will be the one out there with an enormous carbon tax.

Those assumptions are built into all the Treasury modelling. I know they are issues that Senator Cormann examined in detail in his report as well—the false assumptions on which the Treasury modelling on this carbon tax are based. They are false assumptions that the world will deliver, that countries that have made pledges under the Copenhagen Accord will all deliver on those pledges. But, worse than that, it seems Treasury has modelled that beyond 2020 countries will all apply the same emissions reduction approaches as Australia, an 80-per-cent-against-business-as-usual reduction—an enormous assumption to make, an enormous gamble to take with the Australian economy, with absolutely no proof to justify that this is where the rest of the world is going.

Worse still, we see that, even with the carbon tax, all of the evidence indicates that the Treasury modelling—even stacked and flawed as it is, with those false assumptions—shows that emissions will keep going up. In terms of actually achieving the outcome that this legislation is meant to achieve, we will still see Australia's emissions rise from 578 million tonnes to 621 million tonnes in 2020, an increase of 43 million tonnes over the period to 2020. We will still see Australia's emissions go up, and the only way, either in the short term or the long term, that it will achieve anything is through massive multi-billion-dollar reliance on overseas permits, which we will see Australian companies spend billions to buy. They will pass on those costs to Australian consumers, but Australian consumers cannot be compensated because of course the money will never go into government coffers.

That is the final area I will highlight today which the dissenting report outlines—that is, the enormous cost of this proposal to Australia, not just to Australian jobs but particularly to Australian households and to the cost-of-living pressures for all Australians. These are serious issues about which Australians are rightly concerned. Four and a half thousand people or more made their voices heard. Unfortunately, the government has chosen not to listen to them. I seek leave to continue my remarks later.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.