Kerry O'Brien (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Transport) Share this | Hansard source

It is a very important inquiry that the Senate Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport References Committee has been conducting. It is an inquiry that has attracted quite a deal of attention and has canvassed a range of issues to do with the propulsion of the Australian public in the future in various vehicular modes and what will happen with the fuelling systems that are needed to continue that. It is regrettable that the government’s concertinaing of the Senate system has forced the committee, which has been looking at this report, to provide an interim report before the inquiry had time to fully consider all the ramifications of the submissions before it. That is because the government has a majority in this place and has decided that it wants to take complete and utter control not only of the Senate but also of the committee system, and that it could not tolerate the fact that there were committees of this Senate that were chaired by persons other than members of the coalition.

We have seen an important inquiry effectively concertinaed, and we have seen the committee forced to present an interim report. What does that mean? It means that there may or may not be a full consideration of this matter, and there may or may not be a continuation of the deliberations of the committee—depending upon the structuring of committees that results from the considerations currently taking place. The committee structure may or may not be torn up and a new one put in its place and different issues placed with different committees. I understand there is some talk of the transport section of this committee being moved to another committee, which I must say concerns me.

This report in its draft form reached members of the committee earlier this week, and for that reason it has been given as much attention as possible in that very limited time. In a general sense, it has the support of the opposition. But we are not in a position to rewrite sections of the report as we might have wished them to be. I direct no criticism at the secretariat or the chair of the committee for the situation that we find ourselves in. As I say, this is an action forced upon this committee by the actions of the government, acting in their own interests and not in the interests of the Senate or in the interests of this committee.

I will quibble with one of the passages in the report, the last passage in the report talking about the future for hydrogen as a replacement fuel for oil. The committee report suggests that that fuel might be considered in the distant future but is not a useful option to consider in Australia’s ‘current or medium-term transport fuels mix’. I am not sure what ‘medium-term’ means in that context. We had evidence from Hydro Tasmania of a proposal for a project which they were not able to proceed with, with assistance from the Low Emissions Technology Development Fund, because of the limitations of funding available under that fund for what would have been, in my opinion, a very useful project to develop an understanding of just how useful hydrogen would be. On 30 June this year, evidence from Mr Titchen on behalf of Hydro Tasmania outlined the nature of a project that was being considered to be run in the state of Tasmania that involved a small fleet of buses, a fleet of approximately 200 vehicles, and a number of refuelling stations involving hybrid hydrogen-electric technology. I know there are hydrogen buses operating in, I think, Perth at the moment, but this would be a very useful project for this country.

Tasmania has a renewable energy system, with wind and hydro power overwhelmingly providing the energy resource for the state. The generation of hydrogen to fuel those vehicles would be a completely renewable resource and, of course, the development of a technology involving electric and hydrogen fuelled vehicles with no emissions would be a very useful study for this country. But, unfortunately, what was seen to be a $60-plus million project could only receive $20 million in funding from the Commonwealth, from the Low Emissions Technology Development Fund. It is not unsurprising that Hydro Tasmania decided that the risk to Hydro Tasmania—for a very limited return, one must say—given an investment of in excess of $40 million, while the Commonwealth would only put $20 million towards the project, was high. That meant that the board of Hydro Tasmania decided it was not appropriate for them to continue to pursue such an application. While levelling no criticism at them for making that commercial decision, it is regrettable in terms of the national interest that we are not able to pursue that.

Some people might say that it is all very well for Tasmania to talk about renewably generating hydrogen given the energy sources that are used in Tasmania. But it surprises me that no-one is connecting the vast development of wind farms in this country to the potential for the use of renewable energy in the generation of hydrogen for vehicle use right around this country. Certainly wind and solar power create some such options right around this country. But there seems to be a blinkered approach by this government to wind power. We have even seen the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry rail against wind farms in a quite unseemly fashion, almost, in my opinion, depicting himself as somewhat of a troglodyte in terms of the development of new technologies. There is no doubt that in Europe wind power is a very important energy source. It is being used to replace fossil fuels. It is being used to generate clean energy in the Northern Hemisphere.

We have similar opportunities here. We do have a lot of coal, but coal is a major source of CO emissions. We cannot ignore the evidence of global warming, which grows daily. The findings from that ice core that was reported earlier this week, showing that the level of carbon emissions in the last 100 years has exceeded those of the thousands of years before it, should be telling us that we need to make some changes in the fuel use that we have so that we do not impose upon this world enormous climate changes which, I should not have to tell the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, will have a devastating effect on agriculture in this country.

We are talking about drought in south-eastern Australia at the moment. We have seen repeated drought circumstances in south-eastern Australia over the last decade. But here we have the responsible minister railing against one of the technologies which can contribute to the reduction of CO emissions, the reduction in greenhouse gases, so we can try and do something about climate change. But this government has no intention of doing anything about climate change; this government is content to sit back on its haunches and let things go wrong and hope—and, frankly, that is not good enough. This report starts to address some of the issues. Perhaps we will do some more after this report has been handed down. I am not going to hold my breath. We need to look very closely at these issues and we need to make sure that we have a government which looks at all of the issues and makes sure that this country proceeds down the path of alternative fuels, because we are going to need them.