Ian Campbell (WA, Liberal Party, Minister for the Environment and Heritage) Share this | Hansard source

I think I would be more amused to see Senator Milne respond to that fairly pitiful approach from Labor, which I guess reflects the total paucity of any policy ideas when it comes to greenhouse gases or climate change. They have not had a new policy in 10 years. I guess it would be shocking for Senator Milne to expect anything greater than a repeat of the Labor Party’s hatred of regional Australia and Regional Partnerships programs and the continuing attack on Primary Energy, the company of which Ian Kiernan is chairman, after a personal attack on Ian Kiernan recently. Then, of course, there is a slamming of the Roads to Recovery program, which picks up so much of the road funding that is required around Australia because state Labor governments, state by state, have dropped the ball in relation to road funding. These are direct grants to local governments to build roads. I think Senator Milne’s propositions deserved far more attention than was given by the Labor Party.

During the last sitting week I set out the reasons that we were opposed to the more interventionist approach of Senator Milne, but I do not think it is fair to say, as Labor has said, that it is a complex set of arrangements. I do not think it is that complicated. I think Senator Milne proposed the establishment of a task force with four members. This task force is to be established within three months. The task force would report to the minister within 18 months of the commencement of the act. The minister would have to make the report public. You would establish an energy savings fund, which I imagine would be funded by the industrial corporations or companies required to comply with this part of the law. The fund would do certain things: promotion, public awareness building and encouraging energy savings, for example. I do not think it is a complex set of proposals at all. I think it is a cop-out for Labor to say that it is too hard for them to devour this over the last 10 sitting days and come to a conclusion on it.

My view, however, is not as negative about the response that Australians make to the need to protect our climate, to protect our environment and to do so through voluntary measures. The history of the past decade or so shows how the government works in partnership with the private sector, and we have done that very effectively through the Greenhouse Challenge Plus program. We work with them, for example, through the Solar Cities program. There are 11 fantastic short-listed proposals—private-public partnerships again, which I think will transform the impact of the roll-out of renewable energy across Australia. We work together in a range of programs: the building energy rating systems that the Commonwealth has supported; the water energy labelling systems, which again put information into the hands of consumers; the appliance rating systems—all of these world leading systems have the government working in partnership with the private sector to inform people about the consequences of their decisions.

In a way, this mandatory measure—it is not a voluntary measure—mandates for the first time in Australian history that around 250 companies, our biggest energy users, representing around 60 per cent of the energy consumed in Australia, will be required to make an energy efficiency audit and to publish those audits. They will also be required to publish compliance with those audits. That puts a very powerful new measure in place. I think it is unfair to the Australian community and to Australian industry that have in fact responded so strongly, community by community, business by business, household by household, to the challenge of sustainability. How do we ensure that we have a strong economy with job security where people can look forward to the future knowing that they will have an economic environment where their children can get an education and jobs and where the main breadwinners in each household will have some job security? How do we also ensure that they live in that environment of economic security alongside a natural physical environment where the damage done in the past is being repaired and that environment is made sustainable for the future?

More and more people are becoming aware that we cannot keep pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at the rate we have in the past. We have put about a trillion tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere over the past 150 years. If we do not make the sorts of changes that we are part of making here today, we will pump another couple of trillion tonnes into the atmosphere over the next 50 years. The consensus of science says that that could change the climate dangerously and put at risk not only human life but also ecosystems across the planet. We have to find the most efficient and the most effective ways to do what Senator Milne says. It would be terrific—an incredible economic and environmental outcome—if you could, through energy efficiency measures, save us building a couple of fossil fuel powered stations.

Senator Milne is quite right: the state governments between them have about 25 fossil fuel powered power stations on the drawing boards at the moment, and yet they have the temerity to blame the Commonwealth government for not setting up a carbon-trading scheme. They do nothing themselves. They have virtually no program other than very small greenwash proposals to put the odd solar cell on a library here and there or change 20 per cent of the ministerial car fleet to Priuses—all those sorts of greenwash things. Virtually no state government has any serious public investment program to substantially change the greenhouse footprint of Australia. They do have 25 fossil fuel powered power stations on the drawing board, and many of them will get built to fund the increasing number of desalination plants that they have got on their books. So the states really are getting away with murder when it comes to greenhouse gas policy. They can always point the finger at Canberra, but the reality is that here in Canberra the government is committing billions of dollars to investment programs and we are bringing in this new mandatory measure for Australia’s top 250 energy-consuming companies.

I think that Senator Milne is making a very good point in terms of the payback period. Companies will have to look at the payback period of all of these investments and they will have to make an assessment of where they put their investment. The reality of these audits is that for the first time many of these companies will see the bottom line benefits, the energy consumption benefits and the greenhouse gas benefits of reducing their energy use and improving their efficiency. Perhaps, for example, in the case that Senator Allison raised, going to cogeneration will force many companies, for the first time, to look at how they better use heat from existing processes and whether they can use that heat to produce energy and to save energy from the grid and from fossil fuel powered power stations. They may well do it. I think this is a substantial step forward. I think the higher regulatory approach that Senator Milne puts forward would not be effective in the view of the government in improving Australia’s energy efficiency.

Senator Milne asked me to say what this bill’s objectives were and how we would measure effectiveness. We will measure effectiveness when we see the 250 companies do their audits and publish their audits and their compliance. That is what we seek to set out here in terms of the overall targets that the government has set our country. We have set our country a target of limiting our greenhouse gas emissions to 108 per cent of 1990 levels. That is our Kyoto target. We are on track to achieve that. There are many risks to achieving that in a rapidly growing economy but, according to our latest figures, we are on track to achieve that target. We are one of the few countries in the world that is on track to achieve it. Of the annex 1 signatories, the handful of countries that have commitments under Kyoto—and I think there are only 35 of them; less than a third of the world’s emissions are covered by Kyoto—very few will meet their targets through domestic action, as Australia will. That is our target. The government also accepts—or, as the environment minister, I accept—that the globe needs to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by around 50 to 60 per cent by about the middle of this century, as Senator Allison has said. Australia cannot do that unilaterally. Australia may actually be able to make a bigger contribution or it may make a smaller contribution, but the target for the world is a 50 to 60 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.

Australia has also committed, as a very high policy priority, to take on its share and its role in achieving that target as a responsible member of the international community. That is why we are deeply engaged in all of the international processes through the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, through the G8-plus process and through the Asia-Pacific climate change partnership through a series of technological partnerships and a world-leading program of domestic action.