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

This is a slush fund for big gas corporations. That's what the Clean Energy Finance Corporation Amendment (Grid Reliability Fund) Bill 2020 is. The government that says, 'Technology, not taxes; we've got to let the market decide,' is about to open up the $10 billion that exists in the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and make it available to big gas corporations.

We know that gas is as dirty as coal. We know that methane, which leaks and is released into the atmosphere when you start fracking under good farmland and land across Australia, is up to 86 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas. We know that, if we unleash the gas in the Beetaloo Basin or in other places around Australia, we can say goodbye to making our contribution to giving our kids a safe climate to live in. We know that the technology is there now, with renewables and storage, to drive a clean energy revolution.

But what does this bill do? This bill comes in and says, 'Let's make public money available for gas corporations.' I notice the members on the other side have gone very quiet about this. For all their free market rhetoric, they cannot wait to shovel billions of dollars out the door to give to their mates in the gas corporations—the same corporations who turn around and donate to them. The biggest gas corporations in this country over the last few years brought in about $50 billion in revenue and paid zero tax. They did make some donations. They made donations to the government and they made some donations to the Labor Party, but they paid zero tax.

You would think the starting point with big corporations that are contributing to wrecking our planet should be, 'Pay some tax on the massive superprofits you are making and contribute a bit to the cost of dealing with the climate crisis.' But, no, this supposed free market government, that says it loves technology and won't want to interfere in the unleashing of technology, is about to take the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and the $10 billion that is there to drive the uptake of clean technologies in Australia and make it available to dirty, polluting gas and toxic methane. How is it going to do that? This bill changes the definition of what counts, effectively, as clean energy and what counts as low-emissions technology and expands it to explicitly include gas.

Let's just think about this for a moment. We have been told that the decisions we make in the next 10 years will determine whether we get the climate crisis under control. It is a matter of science that we are rapidly heading towards the edge of a cliff. If we go over that 2030 cliff, you can have all the 2050 targets in the world you like, and all the aspirations of getting there, but it will be too late. By that point, climate change will have become an unstoppable chain reaction and we won't be able to rein it in. On current forecasts, which the government blithely accepts, by the end of the century, during my daughter's lifetime, we are heading for an Australia that will be heated by more than four degrees. In a four-degree world, there is carrying capacity on this planet for a billion people. Going from 7½ billion people down to one billion people is an extraordinary amount of war and devastation and conflict. That is what is facing us. On the government's forecasts, that is the temperature we are heading towards unless we act in the next 10 years.

That is why, in the next 10 years, we need to massively invest in renewables and come up with a plan to put coal and gas out of the system. But what's the government doing? The government brings on a bill and says, 'We want to change the definition of clean energy to include gas.' President Biden and his climate envoy, John Kerry, have got it right. They've said that, at this stage, new gas infrastructure is not only going to end up as stranded assets but is massively counterproductive and will get in the way of us tackling the climate challenge. They've said very, very clearly that there is no space for new investment in gas if we want to stay within our carbon budget and avoid going over that climate cliff. That's what the United States government has said and it is what scientists have said. And they are right.

And what does this government do? Instead of coming in and saying, 'Let's have a plan to phase it out,' they're saying, 'Let's take public funds and give them to the gas corporations that pay no tax at the moment and make massive super profits.' This is a subsidy for big corporations that pay no tax and pollute and kill our planet. Why are they getting this money? It's because they make donations. They make donations to the Liberal Party, the Labor Party and the National Party—millions of dollars of donations—and they get their way.

What's even more astonishing is that the Clean Energy Finance Corporation is making a profit at the moment. It is investing in clean energy technologies, and that's the future. And it is making a return to government. This government wants to turn a profit-making Clean Energy Finance Corporation into a venture that invests in losing money on gas. The government knows that public subsidies for gas are the only way gas is going to be profitable, so it is turning a profit-making corporation into something that is going to start losing money on its gas investments—because it wants to bankroll them, and it wants to bankroll gas investments. The government knows that no-one in their right mind is looking at investing in new fossil fuel investments, so they come to the government with their hand out and this government of largesse and donations and subsidies for big corporations is giving money to them. It is not asking these big corporations to pay more tax. Instead, it is giving them massive public subsidies.

I'm waiting for the spirited defence from the member for Goldstein about why there are massive subsidies going to big corporations in his supposedly free market. I'm not hearing very much. All the free market 'technology, not taxes' rhetoric dissolves into dust when it comes to subsidising their big corporate mates. Big corporations have too much power over politicians. They exercise that power through political donations and, in return, they get things like this bill—a massive multibillion-dollar slush fund for big gas. And yet people wonder why the cost of going to the doctor keeps going up or why, when you send your kid to a public school, you get hit with all these voluntary school fees, and what is meant to be a free education turns out to be far from it. Why is everyone else having to pay more? Because these big corporations get away with paying no tax. And, instead of rectifying it, the government is about to give them even more public money.

So we are going to move to amend this, to stop this being turned into the minister's slush fund for gas. We will move to amend this. This government has never seen a fund that it didn't rort. This government loves rorting. The minister in question, the minister for energy, has a very dubious relationship with figures and data. So we are going to move to amend this bill so that the minister does not have the power to tell the independent Clean Energy Finance Corporation how to spend its money and so that the minister cannot come along and say, 'I am going to define gas and maybe even coal as a low-emissions technology.' We are going to stop the minister from being able to do that. And we are going to say to the minister that, if he really wants to take public money and put it into a new coal- or gas-fired power station, as he is regularly on the front page of various papers saying he wants to do, he should come back with a separate piece of legislation. The Clean Energy Finance Corporation is the 'Clean' Energy Finance Corporation. Don't try and use it as another slush fund for corporate mates to funnel money back to gas corporations. That is what he is proposing to do.

This Clean Energy Finance Corporation was set up by the Greens and Labor in the power-sharing parliament of 2010. This government has tried to destroy it. This government tried to wipe out all of that legacy. The only time pollution in this country meaningfully came down was when the Greens, Labor and Independents worked together and put a price on pollution and put in place the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, put in place the Australian Renewable Energy Agency and put in place things like the Carbon Farming Initiative. It has worked. The government tried to get rid of the CEFC. The government does not want this body to exist. The government does not want there to be a profitable government owned organisation that helps clean technologies expand. This is what the Clean Energy Finance Corporation does. It was established to say, 'When these new technologies that are invented pass the proof-of-concept space and turn out to be viable propositions, we will use public funds to help them grow and become self-sustaining businesses.' And it has worked. The CEFC has invested $8.2 billion of public money to generate $29 billion of new economic activity to support jobs and infrastructure and to bring new clean energy technologies online.

The technology that the Prime Minister loves talking about doesn't come out of nowhere. It comes out of organisations like the CEFC supporting researchers and businesses to take their ideas and turn them into viable commercial enterprises. That is what the CEFC is there for. Because renewables are the future and the fuel is free, the CEFC by investing the money has made $1.7 billion in profit from carefully chosen investments, money that actually goes straight back to the government's bottom line. So the CEFC is using public funds to take really good ideas in the renewables and clean energy space and help grow them into viable and thriving businesses. It makes money for the government, because when the businesses make money they pay some back. It is a terrific idea, and that is why the Greens, Labor and the Independents established it.

The government wants to repeal it. It has tried time and time again to repeal it. Because it has been unsuccessful in repealing it, it is now coming back with a different approach. The different approach is to say: 'We know that the public likes renewables and we know that this thing set up by the Greens, Labor and the Independents has been a roaring success and the public wants it. We can't repeal it anymore, so what are we going to do? We are going to change it. We are going to make the money available to the gas corporations. We are going to make it so that there's less money available for renewables and more money available for dirty fuel.' The thing that needs underlining is that the government is now hanging onto the CEFC and ARENA and saying, 'Look at these wonderful things that we are doing.' President Scott Morrison is telling Joe Biden, 'Don't worry; I have the CEFC and ARENA here'—

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