Wilson Tuckey (O'Connor, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Whilst there is a practice in this place not to oppose appropriation bills, these bills—the Appropriation (Water Entitlements and Home Insulation) Bill 2009-2010 and the Appropriation (Water Entitlements) Bill 2009-2010probably represent an example of where that tradition, that convention, should be broken. It should be broken in the public interest and, more particularly, in the environmental interest, and I want to address those aspects during the 20 minutes that are available to me. It is worth putting on the record in the first instance that the spin doctors on the frontbench of this government have yet been unable to meet their projected budgeted targets for any significant program they have put to this House. Let me start with the election promise of a computer for every secondary school kid. That has run $1 billion over. But that was only the first billion. There is $2 billion or $3 billion that was suddenly discovered as an impost on the Australian taxpayer relevant to the funds that state governments must find to service and install and provide software updates for the management of those computers once they got them into their schools. To the best of my knowledge, the New South Wales government said, ‘Thanks but no thanks,’ and that situation is unchanged.

So not only is the cost blowing out but half the kids are not going to get one. I have been told that in many schools the computers supplied have not been taken out of the boxes. They are still sitting in cardboard boxes. So that was a great help! That was the economic outcome. Then all of a sudden we were going to have the Building the Education Revolution. They are very strong on names but very poor on arithmetic. The reality of that program is that they had hardly erected a building before the costs had blown out from $14-odd billion, with the need for another $1.7 billion. As I said, our environment and the challenges of climate change are so often spruiked in this place without any reference to a worthwhile response. Then it gets even worse: $1.7 billion. There were no environmental measures in that.

I picked up the West Australian newspaper the other day, and there was a volunteer group of parents running before- and after-school care and managing a facility—a 100-year-old hall—on the school premises. It was apparently treated with great kindness and was quite weatherproofed. It was run by a volunteer group. If you had to leave home at eight o’clock to get to work, as a working mother—which may be of some interest to the minister at the table, the Minister for Housing and Minister for the Status of Women—you could leave your kids there. There were volunteers there to look after them until school started. If you did not leave work until half past four or five o’clock you could go back to that facility and there were the kids, safe and sound. They have been evicted. Why? The reason is that, under BER, they are going to pull down that hall so they can build another one. There is nothing wrong with the existing building. That volunteer group will disband. For the minister’s information, those parents will have to go to some costly alternative—if it is available. That is a measure of the success of the scheme. It is stupid. It is another $1.7 billion blow-out in a $14 billion program.

We are now being asked to approve another $695.8 million of expenditure—previously budgeted for some time in the future. That gap will have to be filled at that time from revenues from somewhere. What are we approving it for? It is for a dodgy scheme to put insulation in houses. It has been so hurried that it is a clear scandal. We have now had two fatalities, the second being a 16-year-old boy, because the industry was totally incapable—as the opposition warned at the time—of meeting the deadlines proposed. Everybody overnight has become a pink batt installer. They have been scratching around in the roofs, stepping on live wires, putting down insulation with an aluminium base upside down. That is typically used—and I am a frustrated builder—above the rafters. When you are constructing a new house, you put that up there and put the cladding or whatever it might be on top of it. That has been rolled out. Why? For want of something, we have had to import huge quantities of this stuff. The minister just shrugged off the effects of the manufacture of fibreglass or rock-wool.

The member for Parkes told us, and it has been reported, that one bloke got up in his ceiling to find his entire space was full of plastic bags full of newspapers. Just imagine the fire hazard and the potential to cook an entire family. Remember that, because of the lack of law and order in Australia today, people have to lock themselves in their houses and frequently cannot even escape before they are consumed by smoke and other things. There are no regulations. There is no nothing and nobody knows. In an anecdote told to me a fellow was the owner of two houses. The ceiling of one had been partially insulated on a previous occasion. The contractor came in, wandered around, had a quick look and said, ‘Yeah, $1,600 each.’ The fellow said, ‘But the second house is half done.’ The bloke asked: ‘What are you worried about? It’s the government paying the money.’ That is what he said. And we are supposed to approve $690 million to extend that dodgy process.

This is not very environmentally successful and certainly will not have a long-term effect. The reality is that, by the rules applicable, it is going into older-style houses. What is happening all around Australia to older-style houses? They typically sit on the traditional quarter-acre block, which by modern planning rules can accommodate certainly two and up to three residences. What is happening throughout Australia? The members present would all know, when they go into the old suburbs in their own districts, that those older houses—many of them public housing—are being purchased. The blocks are being aggregated and smaller, modern buildings—frequently two storey—are being put on blocks of an area as small as 350 square metres. There has been a case of one subsidy being paid in exactly those circumstances: the house was insulated in the ceiling and knocked down within a couple of weeks. We know how often that has happened in some of the other government programs. Schools have been given grants when their state owners want to close them. Why would you do that?

What is more, why would you ignore the fact that a lot of those old houses were very well designed to manage climate change throughout the year when they were constructed because air conditioning, certainly for many at that level, was not even invented? So what did they have? They had verandahs and things that shaded the walls of the house and reducing the climatic effect, because those were the only options they had. By the way, for 1,600 bucks you can buy an evaporative air conditioner which would be a lot more effective and efficient for most of those houses than a few ceiling batts ever would be. But how many of those houses will be in existence in 10 years time as a result of the massive re-organisation under the infill argument that is so often promoted by Labor state governments? For how long will those houses be there—so where is the long-term benefit of this initiative?

The member for Parkes mentioned buying water entitlements when there is no water there, as compared with maximising the return on the water that is available, and if I have time I will come back to that. But let us first take this $695 million. As I said in the beginning, this is a bad investment in environmental benefit in the reduction of carbon emissions. For a start-off, there is a huge emission factor in making fibreglass and in making rock-wool, the two most effective insulations. It is not called rock-wool for nothing: you create it by melting rock. And do you do that with a magnifying glass getting a little bit of heat on a rock? No, you burn hydrocarbons in huge quantities to do so. And what is fibreglass? It is fibres of glass. And how do you make glass? You melt sand. How much energy does that consume? And, of course, the established local industries would have been very comfortable with a slower program, where they could have manufactured the product in Australia, but, no, it all has to be done in a couple of years and so there are imports from China and other countries. Who knows what the efficiency is of those plants? Who knows how many scrubbers they have on their chimneys for particulates, for sulphur and for all those other things associated with the melting of rock? Who knows? Who cares? Certainly not the Australian bureaucracy or this government: ‘Spend the money.’ And suddenly they have not got enough, so it is: ‘Ask the parliament to give us another $690 million.’

Let me come back to that $1.7 billion overrun in BER. It is a very interesting fact that in the state of Western Australia, as an example for all Australia, we are pumping a lot of gas from the North West Shelf to the industrial and residential areas of the south-west of Western Australia. Everybody says, ‘Isn’t it lovely, we’re generating low-emission electricity from that gas.’ But, in fact, there are 700,000 tonnes of emissions per annum being generated by the gas pipeline in the pumping process, and that is not added in. Furthermore, there is no need for it. By the simple act of commencing to generate the gas fired electricity in the Pilbara, where the gas comes ashore, and transmitting it into the network—which commences in the mid-west of Western Australia at the town of Geraldton, presently in my electorate—by high-voltage DC transmission, only about five to six per cent of the electricity generated would be lost in the journey.

The Chinese are building a 2,000 kilometre 6.2 gigawatt HVDC line to bring their renewables out of the west into the east where they manufacture and employ people. But the Europeans at the highest practical level—not the scientific level but the highest business level—have done a study on producing solar energy in the North African desert, which is the best place to make solar energy because you maximise the radiation effects of the sun, and then having to shift it 3,000 kilometres. They did three tests. They looked at making hydrogen on site and worked out that in the process of transport they would lose 75 per cent of the energy. Then they looked at what runs all around this city and interconnects our country towns—AC transmission, the standard for Australia, with just a couple of exceptions—and found they would lose 45 per cent of the electricity. Then they looked at high-voltage DC—which just happens to interconnect Victoria with Tasmania to good effect—and found they would lose 10 per cent over that 3,000 kilometres.

For $1.1 billion that power that could be generated in the Pilbara could be interconnected to the south-west network. For $1.7 billion you could interconnect the eastern states network with the growing energy demand of the west. And of course if you extended those two wires up north of Broome to where the Browse gas comes ashore you could be bringing down Browse-gas electricity and the product of tidal power in that region sufficient to replace all of Australia’s energy consumption, with a highly predictable resource and technology that, in France, is 40 years old. That is what you could do with the money that is being chucked up in the ceilings of old houses that within 10 years, in many cases, will not exist.

HVDC is an underground system and it can be an undersea system. In fact, when you look at Browse, nobody is yet talking about the potential of actually generating the gas at sea and transmitting it by these wires—which the Europeans are going to put under the Mediterranean Sea in their project. But you could be shipping electricity from that gas resource into northern regions—into Malaysia, into the growing Asian regions—and selling them something. That is in comparison with us going to them, as proposed by this government, to buy certificates to continue to pollute—which is the only product the government emissions trading scheme will deliver.

What is the fight about? What are the opposition doing lobbying and being lobbied for more free certificates to pollute under the ETS? What a great idea that is if you have a genuine interest in the environment and in the climate. Why are we allocating this sort of money to a dodgy scheme that is being abused and exploited throughout the nation, as typically occurs when you rush into things of this nature, when that same money could have delivered massive reductions in energy losses in transmission and interconnected the growth state with these states?

Just think of it, one of the reasons these batts have gone up is to reduce the amount of air-conditioning used in houses. The houses defined for the work typically will not have an air-conditioner. Air-conditioning is now a very significant drain on the electrical system, and it is not base load. It is peak load. Western Australia, I think for the last time, has decided by referendum that daylight saving does not suit the state of Western Australia and there is good reason for that. We have a three-hour time difference between when it gets hot in Melbourne and when it gets hot in Perth. So why are we not installing, for $1.7 billion, an HVDC interconnection between the Western Australian system and the South Australian system, which is interconnected by HVDC with the rest of the eastern states network? Why are we not interconnecting them and keeping the highly efficient generating system in the Latrobe Valley on full load for another three hours, saving the building of a 200 or 300 megawatt coal fired power station in Western Australia? Why are we not doing that?

Any form of machinery always has an optimum level of performance. When you have got to start running your coal fired power stations below that level, your emissions ratio to energy produced is not good. These are the issues. That is where this money should be being spent, but of course it is just going to go up in the roof. Let us hope there is not another fatality but the score is now two, and all because of a government that could not run guts for a slow butcher. These are the sorts of problems we have. They have not achieved budget estimate on any major project they have so far implemented. If you read today’s paper, you see what the AAPT fellow says about the national broadband network. As he says, it is just a process to try and renationalise Telstra. You can see why there is plenty of money around. (Time expired)

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