Tony Windsor (New England, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

A few weeks ago the Prime Minister called for a debate on Australia’s future energy needs and the nuclear issue was mentioned. A number of bills have been before this House, of which this amended legislation is part, which relate to future energy needs and how the excise and transitional arrangements for biofuels, ethanol, biodiesel et cetera will apply. But for some unfortunate reason the government has decided not to have a debate on Australia’s future energy needs and has used the guillotine to truncate some of those debates.

I would like to mention a few issues concerning fuel taxation. The current round of fuel bills that have gone through the House have included, as the shadow minister mentioned a moment ago, a proposal to remove the Fuel Sales Grants Scheme. This means that country people will be discriminated against in relation to the amount of GST that they pay at the bowser. It has amounted to about $270 million a year since 2000 and was described recently by my colleague the member for Gwydir on ABC radio in Tamworth as an inefficient scheme and a scheme that was not equalising the impact of GST on country motorists. If that was the case, why has this government shelled out $270 million over six years to the fuel companies? If the Deputy Prime Minister at the time recognised that it was an inefficient scheme that was not passing on the benefits to country motorists because of the disparity between country and city prices, why wasn’t something done earlier? Why was this massive subsidy of about $1.6 billion given to the fuel industry over those years?

Ethanol and biodiesel have been mentioned in these debates over the last few weeks. In the United States of America by the end of this year something like 20 per cent of the US corn crop will be utilised for ethanol. For those who do not know, that equates to about 60 million tonnes of corn. To put that into some perspective, Australia is one of the major trading nations in wheat—ethanol can be produced from corn, wheat, sorghum and other materials. We export 16 million tonnes of wheat, so it is not hard to see the impact a move towards ethanol or biodiesel would have on the farming community of regional Australia and obviously on the price of wheat.

For instance, in Europe at the moment canola is used for biodiesel, and that is having an extraordinary impact on the world price of canola. And this government does absolutely nothing other than to put in place this legislation. Last week the fuel excise platform bills were introduced to allow for domestic encouragement incentives for domestic ethanol to be removed over time so that imported ethanol would come into this country, which sends a message to investors in this country not to invest in biofuels. I think there are a number of issues in this whole area of energy for our future that really do need greater elaboration in this place. Yesterday’s debate was again truncated. Many members of this House intended to speak on that legislation and raise issues relating to solar energy and the use of bioenergies for electricity. All those issues have been bypassed by this government and I think that is an absolute disgrace at this time in our nation’s history. (Time expired)

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