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

We could be the world's renewable energy superpower. Australia could be the place that industry come to from all around the world, and from around the region, if they want clean, cheap, reliable renewable energy. Look at the sun we have. Look at the wind. Look at the waves around us. We could be world leaders in this stuff. Instead, we have a government that treats 'plan' as another four-letter word.

The Minister for the Environment and Energy got up and gave a long contribution. He seemed to want to win the climate wars by attrition by just soporifically running through what he considered to be fact after fact. Buried in none of that was any vision at all for how Australia could take its place as a world-leading renewable energy superpower. What we need to know about the mess that we are in at the moment is: when this government abolished the carbon price, and they patted themselves on the back and stood in a group hug on the floor of the chamber, what did that do? In the four years after that, the wholesale price of electricity doubled.

The minister and other members like to come in and lecture state governments about their renewable energy targets. The one thing that they do not mention is that in the state of New South Wales—where we have had Liberals in power at the state level while we have had Liberals in power at the federal level for the past few years—the wholesale price has increased the most. The highest wholesale price increase has been in New South Wales, where they are predominantly reliant on coal and where the Liberals have been in power.

What happened? This government came in and tore down the good work that was done in the previous government when Greens, Labor and Independents—people who worked across political differences and across the aisle—put in place a strong and durable plan. The government came in and tore it down, and as a result we are in chaos. We do not have guaranteed supply. Power prices are going up, and pollution is going up as well. It takes a special government to hit that trifecta of not being able to keep the lights on, pushing up pollution and pushing up power prices, but that is what has happened under this federal Liberal government.

What are we going to do? One thing that we need to do is be realistic. We need to get to zero emissions as quickly as possible in this country. The good news is that it is now cheaper to build renewable energy than it is to build coal or even gas. It is now cheaper to build renewable energy potentially with storage than it is to build some forms of gas, and certainly some forms of coal—and that is even without a carbon price, which we are going to get back one day. We have all the tools laid out in front of us, and we need to assemble those tools to make sure we have a national energy plan that sees our pollution coming down, prices coming down—because we know renewable energy is cheaper—and that keeps the lights on. Instead, we are on the verge of going back and making the mistakes of the past because the government seems more intent on developing a plan to satisfy the Trumps on the government backbench and former Prime Minister Tony Abbott than on satisfying the climate scientists. The minister and the Prime Minister seem to be spending day after day wandering around trying to convince their colleagues to support a plan, and everything seems to be about rushing to the lowest common denominator—let's make sure we have a plan that gets Tony Abbott on board so that we can get that through!

If we are going to rewrite the law to define gas and even coal as clean energy, we might as well all pack up and go home now. If we are about to introduce a piece of legislation, simply to keep the Trumps on the backbench happy, that says consumers need to not only pay higher prices for gas but also dip into their pockets to give big gas companies a subsidy—because now, all of a sudden, gas counts as a clean energy—then we are not going to fix the problem. We are simply shunting the affordability problem, as well as the emissions and pollution problem and the security problem, down to the next generation.

What needs to be understood by all of those who advocate fracking and are saying, 'Let's open up more of our farmland'—and saying pollute our water table so that we can get more gas out of the ground because somehow that will fix things—is that you could frack the whole country and it would not bring power bills down by one dollar, because all of the gas is going to go in a pipeline to be processed in Queensland and sold offshore. If you were running a gas company, why wouldn't you? Why keep any of it for domestic use when you can sell it offshore for two or three times the price? You are giving false hope to industry and false hope to consumers if you think gas is going to do anything. We need to get to 100 per cent renewables as quickly as possible. A strong government authority, which will grab this issue by the scruff of the neck and take it out of the hands of politicians and state and federal warfare, will do that. Do not end the climate wars by surrendering. (Time expired)

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