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

by leave—I move amendments (1) to (6) together:

Text of amendments not available at time of publishing

We should give extra support to businesses wanting to cut pollution. One of the best ways that businesses can take steps to cut pollution is by investing in new assets, and one of the best ways that parliament can support that is by giving targeted tax breaks to industries and businesses that decide to do that.

This series of amendments does two things. One is that it extends up to $30,000 the amount of expenditure that a business can invest in their capital to be entitled to get the write-off. The second thing it does is to make it permanent. So we're not just dealing with a year-by-year potential instant asset write-off; we're dealing with something that businesses now know will be there in perpetuity.

The measures that have been announced and legislated so far, and that have been in place for some time, certainly have the support of the Greens. One of the reasons we've supported that is we know it enables investment in renewable energy technology by businesses, and also in some areas of energy efficiency. The Smart Energy Council, for example, has been rightly promoting the availability of the write-off to enable the investment in some forms of generation of renewable energy.

One of the challenges we've got in this country at the moment is that the government does not have a policy to reduce emissions in industry. We used to have a policy that would do that. We used to have a carbon price that applied across the economy. We used to have funds that were established precisely to support businesses that wanted to invest in products or new equipment that would reduce the amount of energy that they used. This government got rid of all of that. The problem is that it's put nothing in its place—absolutely nothing. When you have stationary energy, excluding electricity, accounting for about 18 per cent of Australia's pollution, and industrial processes accounting for about another seven per cent, you've got up to 25 per cent of Australia's pollution, currently without any meaningful policy to reduce it. But you've got many businesses in that sector wanting to do the right thing. There is a lot of opportunity in that sector, if we had some policy, to actually start bringing down our pollution and reducing the power bills of businesses in that sector.

One of the things that we need to start encouraging our businesses to do is fuel switching. There is ample opportunity for many businesses to switch off gas and onto electricity, and if we then make our electricity powered by renewables, that will reduce Australia's pollution. Some good work has been done on this front by government agencies, including ARENA, that shows many businesses currently use gas not even as a feed stock; they use gas for low-temperature industrial processes where you could substitute electricity. They might use it to create steam, for example, as part of their industrial processes. If we could get people off gas and onto electricity, and if we could make that electricity more renewable, then we could help bring down pollution in this country.

We also know that a lot of businesses are increasingly seeing power bills going through the roof and wanting to take steps themselves to bring down their power bills through energy efficiency. It might not be fuel switching from gas to electricity; it might be straight energy efficiency measures. We should actively take steps to encourage those businesses that want to do that. That's why these amendments would extend the amount that a business is able to claim if they want to invest in energy efficiency measures and make that deduction available to them permanently.

I'll say this in conclusion: the Greens do not support giving an across-the-board company tax cut. That is not the right way to go, especially because we know that a big chunk of the money from that company tax cut is going to flow overseas and is not going to do anything to grow the Australian economy. What we do support is targeted tax incentives, which is why we've supported the R&D tax incentive over many years, and why we're now proposing that we should extend a series of measured tax incentives to those businesses that are wanting to take active steps to reduce their pollution by investing in new capital equipment for things like fuel switching or energy efficiency. That is a much better way to stimulate the economy and support the growth of a clean economy without the additional, unnecessary and unfair cost of an across-the-board corporate tax cut.

Question negatived.

Bill agreed to.