House debates
Tuesday, 21 March 2023
Adjournment
Safeguard Mechanism (Crediting) Amendment Bill 2022
7:30 pm
Bob Katter (Kennedy, Katter's Australian Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source
I pay great tribute to my honourable colleague here, who is actually doing something about lowering emissions. When you burn ethanol, CO2 goes up into the atmosphere. It's exactly the same as if you burn petrol; CO2 goes up into the atmosphere, but there's one hell of a difference. Sugar cane, or the grain, pulls it back down again, so it's going up and down instead of going up and staying there. But she's doing it to save lives. A Californian study, which went over 16 years, led every country on earth to move to ethanol to save lives. If you double the emission level, you double the number of people who die of heart and lung disease. The only person in this place who seems to be worried about it seems to be the honourable member.
Morris Iemma said: 'I cannot go another day with the death of people who simply don't have to die on my conscience.' That's why every country on earth, as far as I can make out, is on five per cent. In Brazil it's 49 per cent, and the price of petrol in Brazil is $1.29. Wouldn't it be lovely for us to have petrol at $1.29? Dick Honan was selling it in New South Wales for something like 25 or 30 per cent lower than all of his competitors when he was allowed to put ethanol in the tank, but now he's not allowed to put any more than a very minuscule amount in. The only countries on earth, it appears, that are not using ethanol are ourselves, New Zealand and countries in Africa.
If the honourable member is listened to, then the patron saint of environmentalists, Al Gore—and I recommend the book. I'm an anti-green myself, but I think that anyone who reads the book will get a good scientific hold on what the problem is, how serious it is and what needs to be done.
Dr Katharina Fabricius of the Australian Institute of Marine Science is considered to be one of the best environmentalists in the world. She said that, if you increase the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, you increase the carbon dioxide in the ocean, and this tends to change the pH level; it becomes more acidic. She asked, 'You know what a shell is?' I said: 'It's calcium carbonate. That's a base, an alkaline.' She said, 'If we increase the acidity of the ocean, what happens to the shellfish?' I said: 'Does that matter? They're not the bottom of the food chain.' She said, 'They are.' She said that you need a magnifying glass to see most of them.
You might question climate change, but you can't question the effect on the ocean. The unassailable scientific argument is there, so we need to pull back. This meagre, measly piece of rubbish that we're talking about tonight imposes an extra burden upon industries for no good purpose, whereas what we on the crossbench are advocating will almost completely eradicate transportation emissions and reduce our emissions by 20 per cent in the space of four or five years. Over 20 per cent—23 or 24 per cent—of our emissions can be reduced, but we're not going down that pathway; we're going to fool around at the edges. We've fooled around at the edges over 15 years now, and we've reduced it by 16 percent, arguably. That is assuming that when you put the solar on the roof there is no cost in CO2.
As I've explained previously, on many occasions, you burn up an awful lot of CO2 in producing that solar panel, which, in any event, has to be replaced after 20 years. If you're not cleaning it every eight or nine days—think of how many times you clean your windscreen. Once a week? Once a fortnight at least? That's what you have to do with solar panels. Does anyone in Australia climb up on the roof and clean their solar panels? No. Our instructions, when we put the first system in in Australia, was: every eight or nine days you need to clean the solar panels to get them to work properly. As fair-minded, objectively minded people who come from all points of the political spectrum, we can agree to make it better, but the major parties don't— (Time expired)
7:35 pm
Michelle Ananda-Rajah (Higgins, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source
Today the IPCC report was released, and it is a sobering read, just like all the previous IPCC reports. It is a call to arms, and it only confirms what Obama said—that we are the first generation to live through the consequences of climate change and we will be the last generation that will have a chance to do something about it. It also sounded a note of hope, and that was the sound of a gun that was fired last year, through the passage of our historic Climate Change Act. That gun sounded the note of climate action, a clarion call to the rest of the world, sending a signal to markets, giving businesses and industry the policy certainty they needed in order to invest in Australia, in her ambition and her future.
It laid out across the sky that Australia was open for business, but we also know that, since the passage of that act, storm clouds have been gathering. Those storm clouds have been getting closer and closer, and they threaten to rain on our parade. I speak of the Biden administration's passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, which, in combination with the CHIPS act and the infrastructure bill, pours the equivalent of A$3.2 trillion on the green shoots of green industrialisation in the US. In its scope and magnitude, it is simply overwhelming. I congratulate the United States for acting on climate change in this way. As we know, for decades congress has been gridlocked on this matter. Through the passage of these acts, the US is moving, but there are always winners and losers.
The effect has been surgical in some parts of the world, particularly in Europe. We have seen capital and businesses move across to the US. The car industry has gone, in some cases, followed by battery manufacturers. We've also seen the movement of fledgling green hydrogen industries to the US, based on the fairly generous tax incentives and subsidies that this conglomeration of acts provides. There's no question that this historic series of acts has exerted a gravitational pull. The US is drawing in capital and talent. What does that mean for Australia?
The first thing is that we on this side of the house understand that our green hydrogen industry is exposed, but we're also doing something about it, and that's the key. The energy and climate ministers met on 24 February. They identified that this was a threat to our industry and committed to refreshing our green hydrogen agenda, and it can't happen too soon. Why? Because four days later a multimillion dollar green hydrogen project in the Hunter was put on ice. We know that the Inflation Reduction Act is there, an ever-present force in Australia, but it is actually not our enemy. The enemy is complacency. For too long, Australia has been a nation that has rested on its laurels. We have been the world's quarry, without considering the value-add. That is something the Albanese government is addressing through its National Reconstruction Fund, which is pivoting this country to a manufacturing nation, modernising it. We're going from a commodity driven nation to a more complex, diversified economy, and green hydrogen, along with all our renewable energy, will be a core enabler of that mission. But that's not all. Complacency was driven from this House through our work on housing, skills and visa reforms, as well as health. All these things underpin a healthy and vibrant economy.
In terms of our actual work in green hydrogen, we're sending rivers of money down—over half a billion dollars to support green hydrogen hubs in Gladstone, the Hunter and the Pilbara. This is also in concert with the $20 billion we're investing in transmission, because green hydrogen cannot happen without renewable energy captured from the sun and our wind—massive natural endowments that are then sent to the manufacturing hubs we're going to be installing.
I close by saying that the IRA and similar schemes incorporating these incentives are threats to our domestic industries, but it is also highly motivating on this side of the House because it has forced us to lean harder towards this green boom.