Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Since being elected I have had the privilege of meeting some pretty remarkable people. One of those people is the climate change adviser to the German government. He said to me: 'When we in Germany look at Australia, we scratch our heads. With all your natural sunlight, wave power and wind, with all your advanced manufacturing capacity and the smart people that you have got, why aren't you leading the world in renewable energy? Why is it being left up to cloudy Germany to do that?' That is a very good question. The people of Australia want Australia to be a world leader in renewable energy and they are already taking steps in that direction. At the moment, three million people in this country live under a roof that has solar power on it. There is a diminishing demand for energy as more and more people are powering their own homes and their own lifestyles, including with solar power. The take-up of renewable energy in this country is actually growing faster than people expected. Knowing that we have got to cut pollution in this country to zero by the middle of this century at the absolute latest and that it is much better for people to live with the clean air, clean water and healthy surroundings that come from renewable energy, most would think that that is a good thing. But this government is intent on destroying the renewable energy industry in Australia. This government has declared war on renewable energy.

Elsewhere today there is the release of the so-called review into the Renewable Energy Target. The government appointed a renewable energy hater and climate sceptic to conduct that review so as to give them the answer that they wanted to hear, which is the answer that the fossil fuel interests backing this government have demanded. It was: 'Australia was trying to increase the amount of renewable energy we produce. We are actually doing better than expected. People are moving away from fossil fuels to renewable energy. Please, government, we would like you to come and help us, the polluting power stations, and stop this from happening.' The government seem to be on the verge of breaking an election promise they made to the Australian people who want renewable energy by obliging and by saying: 'We are very, very happy to do what you want, and we will change the rules so that the billions of dollars of investment in wind farms and solar plants that exist in this country are now rendered next to worthless. We are quite happy to do that, and, at the same time, we will continue to keep on giving you, in the fossil few sector, subsidies.' So, the government are out there to try to bring the renewable energy industry in this country to its knees. That is the government's first broken promise on renewable energy, but now this bill is another one.

In the lead-up to the election the government could not talk highly enough about ARENA, and even after the election they were telling the community and ARENA that its funding was secure. Why? Because what ARENA, the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, is doing is exactly what the people of Australia want. It is saying: 'We recognise that, at the moment, we are at a point of transition in this country.' We are a country that, up until now, has built our economy and our society on the back of fossil fuels. That was not because a cabal of people sat around and decided how we could wreck the environment the most, but was because, for the first 200 years since white settlement, that is what people thought you could do and that it would not come at a cost to the community or to the environment. Well, it turns out that digging up coal and burning it comes at an enormous cost to our community. We are seeing the effects of climate change now with more frequent and more intense bushfires and droughts and potential changes that will be permanent in parts of Australia, which will mean that we will no longer be able to grow the kinds of crops that we used to. In that context we have to immediately, as quickly as we possibly can, switch over from that polluting fuel source, which we have taken for granted, recognise the cost and move to renewable energies.

We are at the point where the renewable energy industry needs that support to grow in Australia so that we can become a renewable energy world leader. That is what ARENA does. It takes money that, in part, comes from other sources, like the Clean Energy Finance Corporation. It takes money and says: 'For those early-stage projects, we will support you until you can stand on your own two feet', and then you go out into the world and run yourself as a business. What is ARENA doing at the moment? In New South Wales ARENA money helped Australian scientists in the CSIRO work out how to heat steam using solar power to such a high temperature that that steam was then going to be able to power a coal fired power station, an ordinary turbine power station. In other words, by superheating the steam to a critical point, if they could get this technology up and working and make it commercial and proven, they could turn every coal fired power station into a solar power station by using the sun to heat the water instead of burning the coal to heat the water. What a good idea. You could keep much of Australia's existing electricity network, you could keep the jobs in the areas where the power stations currently are, but you switch every coal fired power station over to a solar one. That is something that ARENA is doing. ARENA is helping out with a 6.7 megawatt solar PV farm in remote Queensland. It is helping out with a huge solar project in New South Wales, and, excitingly, in Western Australia it is helping out with the Carnegie Wave Energy project. This is just the tip of the iceberg of what is going on in this country at the moment.

In Melbourne we have scientists and researchers working out how to print solar cells onto any surface. At the moment they are working with the people in this country who produce banknotes. They have worked out how to print solar cell straight onto the polymer surface of banknotes. One of the other partners in that project at the start was—I do not know if they still are—BlueScope Steel. They wanted to work out how you print directly onto corrugated iron or similar surfaces so that, when you put the corrugated iron on your roof, you do not need to put a solar panel on because the roof is the solar panel. Newcastle University has made advances in getting microscopic solar cells into paint so that you can paint the side of your house and that will become a power source. If we could just pause for a moment and think about how this could transform how we all use energy. You could print onto the cover of your laptop so that, when you are sitting in a room like this typing on your laptop, the light from the room powers the laptop. It opens up massive opportunities.

Storage is one of the key questions facing renewable energy at the moment—how do you store that energy that gets produced by the sun during the day so that you can use it overnight? We have a great work, again ARENA funded, going on in this country to work out how to make the batteries that will be able to capture that energy and store it and then be able to be turned on at the flick of a switch overnight when you wake up and want to turn the light on to get a drink of water—so that the sun during the day continues to power your home at night.

Think about what is happening in countries like India, where they are trying to lift parts of their population out of poverty but they do not have a centralised power network. We already have people from Australia taking products over to India that allow them to have solar lights that charge up during the day that will then shine at night, so that you can have a pollution-free power source in your shack, your home or your tent without the need to be connected to the electricity grid—all done by renewables.

All of these advances are happening now. It could be the kind of thing that Australia sells to the rest of the world in the 21st century. But they need support to get on their feet. But what does this government come and do? This government says, 'We are going to lop you off at the knees.' What has not been mentioned by any of the previous government speakers is that, in the budget, the funding to ARENA was cut from over a billion dollars over the next three years to just $341 million. Almost three-quarters of the money for new projects for ARENA are just gone.

And now the government wants to abolish the agency itself. The government says, 'It's alright because some of the projects will still be done under the minister.' The whole point of this agency was to have an organisation that is at arm's length from political influence, that is going to spend the money in the best way possible, that is going to spend the money not by picking winners of particular kinds of technologies that are liked but by saying, 'That looks like a good project that is worth investing in; we'll try that'—whether it is wave, whether it is solar, whether it is geothermal—and you would not have a minister looking over and saying, 'No, this does not meet my ideological agenda; take it off.' The government is now saying that that is exactly what it wants to go back to. The government wants to have a climate science denying government in charge of slashing funding to renewable energy instead of letting an arm's length independent agency do what the Australian people want.

Do not forget that this government went to the election saying that it would keep this agency, and has offered no justification for breaking its promise—other than the government is just a bunch of corporate shills doing the bidding of the fossil fuel industry. That is the only conclusion that can be drawn when you join the dots between this attack on renewable energy and the attacks through the renewable energy target. You might have some sympathy for the previous speakers'—and no doubt the future speakers'—arguments about, 'Government can't support industries and it is up to industries to stand on their own two feet.' We have seen today what has happened with Qantas after the government turned its back on them. We have seen what happened to Holden after the government turned its back on them.

The government has said all the way through, 'Unless you make chocolate in Tasmania in marginal seat, we are not going to come and give you industry assistance; we will let you stand or fall.' But, at the same time, every year the government gives $2.2 billion to fossil fuel companies just so the likes of Gina Rinehart can go and buy cheap petrol. When anyone in this country goes to the bowser to fill up they pay 38c a litre tax. When the likes of Gina Rinehart and the fossil fuel companies go and put diesel in their trucks, they only pay six cents because the taxpayer funds them the extra 32c. That is $2.2 billion a year. So why, Government, are you prepared to pour $2.2 billion a year into mining companies to help them out but you are not prepared to support solar, wind and renewable energy?

When you add up the other subsidies that this government gives to the fossil fuel sector, you see that there is $13 billion over the budget period—over the next four years—that is available to fund projects like ARENA. So when the government says, 'Businesses need to stand on their own two feet' and 'The age of entitlement is over', I will believe that when the government starts taking away those subsidies from the mining and resources sector. Until then, what you are doing is picking sides. You are not backing winners; you are backing losers in the fossil fuel sector and you are going out of your way to cripple renewable energy in this country. But people are slowing waking up. There is a reason that, according to the polls, if an election were held today the government would lose. It is because you can be disciplined in opposition and have three-word slogans as much as you like but, when you are in government and the veneer is peeled off, people start finding out the nasty things that you, the government, believe and they do not like it.

See this speech in context