House debates

Wednesday, 7 September 2022

Bills

Treasury Laws Amendment (Electric Car Discount) Bill 2022; Second Reading

6:51 pm

Photo of Bob KatterBob Katter (Kennedy, Katter's Australian Party) Share this | Hansard source

I applaud the contribution by one of my crossbench colleagues. I'm absolutely fascinated by this place. It never ever ceases to amaze me. I go home and I'm the hero in the pubs when I tell them the latest news from Canberra. Well, the latest news is we're going subsidise imports. We're going to subsidise imports! Stand back from this decision and understand that you are subsidising imports.

There is a bloke called Ben Chifley who is in a lot of books, but, in my book, he is the Prime Minister without peer because he built the Australian motor car for Holden, and he did a number of other wonderful things. But, if you proposed to Ben Chifley, or 'Red Ted' Theodore, that a Labor government should subsidise imports, they would absolutely destroy you. They would not forget your name. They would pursue you until you were destroyed.

This country proudly, once upon a time, built its own motor cars. When we were given the opportunity to buy an Australian motor car, 62 per cent of the motor cars sold in Australia were Holdens. Then, later on, when other manufacturers opened up, that went up to 72 per cent of the cars sold in Australia. What happened was that they moved the dollar, they propped it up, and, when it fell through the floor, the price of cars doubled. The Productivity Commission said that, if we removed the tariffs and subsidies, there would be a 23 per cent intrusion into the Australian market within 15 years. Well, within five years, it was a100 per cent intrusion, when Mr Keating removed the support levels and let the dollar float—or pushed the dollar up, and then it collapsed.

I just want to go back to the basic premise here. We're going to subsidise imports. For heaven's sake, why would you not build the cars yourselves? I'm very confident all the crossbenchers will be moving to that effect. The other members and the major parties can decide to either join us in building our own motor cars or continue to subsidise imports. They'll be given that choice.

If you are serious about cutting emissions, I think the book you should read—and it's a textbook available throughout the world—is Al Gore's book. I describe myself as an anti-Green. I refer to the Greens as 'gangreens'. They don't refer to me very nicely either, I've got to say. But read Al Gore's book. The first solution is ethanol.

You don't have to be Mr Albert Einstein to figure out that if you burn petrol, or you burn coal, or you burn coal to make glass that goes on your roof—because there's some sort of thing. Oh, it's a miracle! You just put the stuff on your roof and there's no emissions. Well, just hold on a minute. You've got to make superpure silicon. As a mining man who mined my own copper from my own mines, I can tell you that it is extremely complicated to produce superpure silicon. I speak with very great authority, because, if you ask who was the person who put the first standalone solar energy system in Australia—I won, arguably, a national science prize that year—it was me. Right back in 1983, we put the first system in, and it is a wonderful system for Normanton or Julia Creek or Kowanyama. But, if you start putting glass on roofs in the cities, it would be really silly. It would be criminally silly from the point of view of CO2.

I haven't got time, in a short speech, to be able to tell you how to make superpure silicon. The reason I'm an expert in the field is that we negotiated with GE. The head of GE for the world came out for the opening of the first standalone system in the Southern Hemisphere, which was on Coconut Island, and the reason he was so interested was that there are some 300 islands in Indonesia that will need to be electrified with solar power. Now, we wanted to sell the silicon. We've got the best silicon resources in the world, and we export it. We were exporting it for $56 and buying it back for $3 million a tonne as optical fibre or as solar panels. We exported it for $56 a tonne and we imported at $3 million a tonne. Well, how much longer?

Our economy is a primitive economy. We're not an industrialised nation. Our exports now are almost exclusively coal and iron ore. And how do you get iron ore? You smelt it. How do you smelt it? With coal. So you burn coal to get iron ore. The solar panels on your roof must be pure silicon. How do you treat silicon to get it to be pure? You have to smelt it. What do you smelt it with? Iron ore. There's another nasty little intrusion in silicon, because you've got to put it under electromagnets, which use a huge amount of electricity. Silicon is the second-hardest element on earth. It's second to diamond in hardness. To crush it is not a lot of fun. I can tell you, as a mining man, that putting it in a bore mill is hard yakka. But then you've got to smelt it, and you smelt it with coal. So what do you think? This glass gets on your roof without any CO2 going up in the atmosphere? And, in 20 years time, you'll take it all off again. I don't know how much energy you burn up putting it on the roof and then taking it off again. Now, I'm not knocking it, because I think that it's wonderful in remote situations, but to use it in a city is an act of madness.

You have heard speakers here say that the power is cheaper—that it's cheaper to run electric car. Yes, it is. And solar is cheaper, yes. But, for using intermittent solar power, the baseload power resultingly rises, because the power station that was once producing 100 per cent of our electricity can now only sell 70 per cent of its electricity. So, of course, for it to be able to work profitably, the price of baseload power must go up. The state with the most solar on the roof is Queensland, as it should be; we've got the most sunlight. But did the power prices come down? Did the price of electricity come down? No. The price went up 400 per cent. So let me tell you what the net result is of this glass on your roof. Four out of five of our neighbours in Charters Towers are pensioners, so they can't afford the capital outlay to put solar on the roof. The banks won't look at them because they're advanced in years, so they can't put solar on the roof. But rich people like the Katters can. My wife put solar on the roof, so we don't pay anything for our electricity, but pensioners subsidise us. Our pensioner neighbours subsidise us. If it's so wonderful, how come the price of electricity in Queensland has gone up 400 per cent since I was the minister in Queensland? It was $674 for 11 straight years. There was no justification for putting it up. Last time I looked, it was $3,240 a year.

I just find it almost impossible to vote for legislation that subsidises imports. A number of crossbenchers have discussed this at great length and we prepared legislation which was to go before the last parliament. What we're proposing is that we build electric cars in Australia. The simple way to do this, without any cost, is for all government cars in metropolitan areas to be electric and all buses, which we do make in Australia, to be electric. It's very simple to do that. Why wouldn't you do that? More people die in Australia from motor vehicle emissions than from motor vehicle accidents. You can cut that out by simply putting five to 15 per cent ethanol in your petrol tank, which every country on earth has done except Australia. Look at the map of the world. The European agreement is that every country goes to a minimum of five per cent—and I'm not going to go into the details. If you move from a rural centre into Sydney, then your chances of dying of lung cancer or heart disease double. Those are the long-term findings in America, out of California. From that point forth, America immediately moved the Clean Air Act and put ethanol in their petrol tanks.

These answers are there. Australia will be producing our own petrol. We export all of our oil. What sort of a moronic country exports all of its oil and imports all of its petrol, diesel and avgas? Are we complete morons in this place? When I sit here and subsidise imports, I think that we are. My colleagues on the crossbenches have been working to formulate a program that will return the building of motor cars to Australia. Sophisticated secondary industries will be restored to this country, and those industries will be owned by the Australian people. Ben Chifley was the Prime Minister without peer. He is so far out in front that there is no-one one that could compare, but Ben did make a mistake: he let General Motors build motor cars in Australia. They should have been built and owned by the Australian people, and that would have been a very simple thing to do at the time. His government was destroyed because they wanted to nationalise the banks, so he was not going to be a person that had the political ability to go in a different direction.

Having said all those things, we are moving an amendment that has been circulated in my name. I move:

That all words after "whilst" be omitted with a view to substituting the following words:

the House notes:

(1) this bill seeks to encourage a greater take up of electric cars by making them more affordable by, under certain conditions, exempting them for fringe benefits tax; and

(2) that to achieve real and effective affordability and self-sustainability the bill should include detailed measures to provide:

(a) Australian manufacture by Australian majority owned companies of electric vehicles and buses, and their component parts including battery production;

(b) framework to require, by 2035, all vehicles in metropolitan areas purchased by local, state, territory and federal governments to be electric vehicles manufactured in Australia from Australian made component parts; and

(c) framework to facilitate the purchase of all new commercial and government buses in metropolitan areas to be electric buses manufactured in Australia from Australian made component parts".

I just want to add: when I hold this map up to everyone and I say, 'What's that a map of?', they all say, 'Australia.' Well, no, it's not actually. It's a map of Australia shorn of the eastern coastline. It's shorn of Victoria—but who'd miss Victoria—and a little dot around Perth. There are only a million people living there. Our biggest export is iron ore, and guess where it comes from: the golden Australia where there's no-one living. Our second-biggest export is coal, and guess where the coal comes from: the golden Australia where no-one is living. Guess where all the water is: in the golden Australia where no-one is living. Guess where all the cattle are: in the golden Australia where no-one is living. Guess where all the aluminium is: in the golden Australia where no-one is living. And how much longer do you think that's going to go on for?

If you give us a little skerrick of the $170 billion that is coming into superannuation funds, we will build small dams, which will create an enormous improvement in our environmental conditions, where 15 million hectares has gone under prickly acacia tree, and the place is overrun with pigs. We can deal with those things if you give us a little skerrick of money to build a series of small dams with thread irrigation. If you fly over it, you won't see much green, but it will improve our lot immensely. Then we can give you back all the petrol you will ever need, free forever.

When you burn petrol, CO2 goes up into the atmosphere. When you burn ethanol, CO2 goes up into the atmosphere, but there is one huge difference: the next year, the sugar cane or grain, sorghum, pulls it down again. So it goes up and it goes down. But it doesn't go up and stay up. That's why no less a person than Al Gore, in An Inconvenient Truth, gives us the first solution: ethanol. If you look at the European agreement, they all have to go to five per cent. That is actually for medical reasons, not so much for environmental reasons, although that was part of it. Japan is on five per cent. China is going on five per cent. India claim they are going on five per cent. America is on about 15 per cent. Brazil is on 40 or 50 per cent. These are the leading economies on earth. They're all doing it, with one exception. Where in the world does a government subsidise imports? Tell me any country that subsidises imports. But that is what we are doing here.

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