Kelvin Thomson (Wills, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Five researchers in 2007 estimated that climate change would result in a two-to-fourfold increase in extreme fire days. Between 1973 and 2010, Melbourne and Adelaide recorded a 49 per cent increase in their cumulative annual Forest Fire Danger Index, and in February 2009 Victoria's Black Saturday bushfires killed 173 people, destroyed over 2,000 homes and cost $4 billion-plus in damage, and on that day the fire index was an unprecedented 190 on a zero-to-100 scale.

The government claims its motivation for this legislation is to bring down electricity and other prices for ordinary households. They have repeatedly claimed that households would be better off to the tune of $550 a year without a price on carbon. But less than a fortnight ago the head of the Australian Industry Group, Innes Willox, let the cat out of the bag. He said many businesses were not able to pass on the cost of the carbon tax in the first place. He said many price changes, if the carbon price is abolished, are likely to be limited. What he is saying is that consumers will not get lower prices if the carbon price is repealed.

I was elected on a platform of support for the carbon price and of action to combat extreme weather. I will be voting against the repeal of the carbon price. That is what my constituents would expect me to do, not to vote differently from the position I have expressed many times in the past 10 years. I listen to government members talking about mandate. That might cut some grass had they voted in favour of the emissions trading scheme the Labor government brought forward in the 42nd Parliament when we had expressly gone to the election on a platform of introducing a carbon price. Did the Liberal and National Parties respect that mandate? No, they did not. They made disparaging comments about the whole notion of mandate. I will behave as I have told my constituents I will behave—voting for a price on carbon. Why on earth should we shred our international credibility on extreme weather and leave our children a heritage of bushfires, droughts, floods and cyclones for the sake of what the Liberal government says is $11 per week for a household and which the Australian Industry Group admits you will never see?

It is correct that electricity prices have been rising, and rising much faster than the CPI throughout the last decade. But this predates the carbon price. In 2010 I gave a speech to the House about rising electricity prices when I pointed out that prices in the larger capital cities were rising at roughly twice the rate of the CPI and had roughly doubled in a decade. I said the government should look into pegging electricity prices to the increase in the CPI and thereby give some relief to pensioners and retirees and others who struggle to pay their electricity bill. And I make the same suggestion to this government as I made to my own—do it. Peg electricity price rises. If members opposite are as genuine as they claim to be in their concern about the impact of rising electricity prices, then peg them. Call in the states, call in the power companies, and peg them to the CPI. I dare you.

The reasons why electricity prices in the capital cities were rising so rapidly with no carbon price in sight were threefold. First, there is the impact of rapid population growth. The Queensland academic Jane O'Sullivan has done some very important research in the infrastructure burden in rapidly-growing communities. She has found that the cost of meeting the infrastructure requirements of a population growing by one per cent per annum is fifty per cent higher than for a stable population, and if the population is growing by two per cent per annum it is 100 per cent, that is, double. Of course if your population increases by one per cent, that tends to bring in one per cent extra taxes or rates, not 50 per cent, so the cost of the extra infrastructure shows up in higher electricity, gas and water bills and council rates.

Secondly, there is privatisation of the electricity authorities. The National Combined Energy Unions, including the ETU, ASU and the AMWU, wrote to MPs in October pointing out that Victoria and South Australia, where all electricity assets have been privatised, have had the highest electricity consumer prices for the past 11 years.

This feeds into the third driver of rising electricity prices, the gold-plating of the poles and wires—increased expenditure on infrastructure—because electricity customers in practice have to pay for it and do not have a realistic choice to reject it; electricity is essential in a modern society. The upgrade of the Brunswick Terminal Station in my electorate is a classic example of this. Its cost has skyrocketed, but consumers have no effective recourse and no way of telling electricity companies they do not want a gold plated system and wish to explore alternatives.

It is fair to say, and indeed has long been my view, that a price on carbon is an important, but not sufficient, condition for reducing Australia's carbon emissions and that complementary measures are important also. Under the Labor government, two very important complementary measures were the 20 per cent renewable energy target and the $10 billion Clean Energy Finance Corporation.

But there are a number of other initiatives which could reduce greenhouse emissions, and if the Liberal government was serious about reducing greenhouse emissions it would seriously consider them. In the United States, President Barack Obama has been preparing regulations limiting carbon dioxide emissions from existing power plants using the Environmental Protection Agency. In the US, electricity power plants are the largest single source of carbon pollution, responsible for nearly forty per cent of greenhouse gas emissions.

The Australian Conservation Foundation has set out steps to ensure carbon pollution falls with the urgency required, to demonstrate international leadership for strong global action, to increase renewable energy at the scale and urgency needed and to remove incentives for fossil fuel use and reinvest the savings for more productive use. It recommends that Australia commit to set science based caps on greenhouse pollution in 2014, based on advice from the independent Climate Change Authority, and commit to doing our equitable share for an effective global agreement to reduce the impacts of climate change. The ACF says we should complement the carbon price with a suite of policies that drive reductions in domestic emissions intensity by accelerating renewable energy deployment, increasing energy efficiency and ensuring declining pollution from fossil fuel use while the carbon price matures.

The ACF also says we should reform wasteful government incentives to produce and use fossil fuels, and reinvest the savings into a cleaner economy. It says international pledges made to the Copenhagen Accord, while significant, would still result in warming of 3½ degrees Celsius even if fully implemented. For Australia, warming of two to three degrees Celsius would result in 97 per cent of the Great Barrier Reef bleached every year; a 40 per cent reduction in livestock carrying capacity of native pasture systems; a five to 10 per cent increase in tropical cyclone wind speeds; and a 10 per cent increase in bushfire danger in many parts of the country. The ACF says a global agreement to limit warming to as close to 1½ degrees Celsius as soon as possible, and 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide equivalent, is in Australia's national interest. Beyond this point, the impacts of climate change for Australia and the region become severe and irreversible. To this end, Australia must speed the ratification of the second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol.

I also note an article of November 2010 titled 'The economics of population policy for carbon emissions reduction in developing countries' by David Wheeler and Dan Hammer from the Center for Global Development. They draw the conclusions that family planning and female education are complementary activities that, jointly or separately, are highly cost-competitive with a broad range of carbon emissions abatement options that are current candidates for mitigation resources in global climate negotiations. Family planning and female education are both critical factors in sustainable development and they obviously merit expanded support, even without appeal to global climate considerations.

The carbon price has been doing exactly what it was supposed to do—cutting carbon emissions. Contrary to the scare campaign of members opposite, it has not adversely affected our low inflation, low unemployment economy. I particularly congratulate former minister Greg Combet on its success. The only reason those opposite have campaigned against this is they are totally and utterly beholden to large corporations who have a vested interest in increasing, rather than reducing, carbon emissions.

The carbon price stands in stark contrast to the coalition position known as direct action. No serious economist believes it is efficient and no serious climate scientist believes that it will be effective.

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