Josh Frydenberg (Kooyong, Liberal Party, Minister for the Environment and Energy) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the honourable member for Shortland for his questions and confirm to him that the government remains on track to meet and beat its 2030 targets, just as we beat our first Kyoto target and just as we are on track to beat our 2020 target by 224 million tonnes. When it comes to the Emissions Reduction Fund, I think it has been a star performer. I think the land sector has been very, very pleased with the fact that 189 million tonnes of abatement have been met by the various projects that have been undertaken, at a cost of abatement of around $11.83 per tonne. The Labor Party knows that, when it had its dreaded $15 billion carbon tax, the impost on households was much higher than that—by a multiple factor. It was only pursued by the Labor Party because of its ideological position on this issue. The Emissions Reduction Fund still has $300 million left in it, and that should at least provide for one more significant auction—or more. We are getting a more mature market; hence the cost of abatement has gone up slightly, but it is still a very successful program.

I was asked by the honourable member how we are going about meeting our targets. We are doing it through a suite of policies, as the member for Grey would know. We have had the National Energy Productivity Plan. A building built in Australia in 2007 uses 30 per cent more power than a building built in Australia after 2010. We are doing a lot of initiatives through LED lighting and other appliance standards and the like. We believe we could get a 40 per cent improvement to energy productivity by 2030 through the various measures underway. We also have the renewable energy target. There were certainly some problems with the design of the renewable energy target: not providing for storage; not providing for FCAS, frequency control ancillary services; and not providing any geographical restrictions. These are the issues that Dr Finkel has taken head-on in his attempt to ensure a more stable system overall, because we do not want to see a repeat of the statewide blackout we saw in South Australia through the sheer negligence of a Labor government there, which did not prepare for the eventuality that occurred. So it is the Emissions Reduction Fund, the National Energy Productivity Plan and the renewable energy target.

It is an inconvenient truth—and I like to use that term, 'inconvenient truth'—for the Labor Party that we have seen a fivefold increase in renewables in 2016 compared to 2015. Look at the ABS numbers for jobs in renewables in 2012-13; it does not make for very good reading for the Labor Party. We have seen Australia, under the coalition government, become one of the five top destinations in the world for renewable energy investment. Another major achievement of the coalition government has been the work we are doing to phase out HFCs, hydrofluorocarbons, and making it a global effort to do so, because those forms of gases provide a problem for the atmosphere, and our work to phase them out over time has been very important.

In the time remaining, I want to point the finger at the member for Shortland and ask: why did he and the member for Port Adelaide fail to move their fellow caucus members and get them to support what they know would be good policy—for the Clean Energy Finance Corporation to be able to invest in carbon capture and storage? If you were genuinely technology neutral, as the Labor Party's own election platform stated in 2016, then you would support a form of technology proven throughout the world and supported by everyone, from the CSIRO, Australia's Chief Scientist and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to the International Energy Agency, as a means to reducing emissions from thermal generation and emissions from the industrial sector. That is why the people at Shell, the people at BHP, the people at BlueScope and the people of the Business Council of Australia came out to support it and welcomed the coalition's announcement of amending the legislation for the Clean Energy Finance Corporation. It goes to the heart of the hypocrisy of the left in the Labor Party. (Time expired)

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