Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

It is clear that there is no analysis and that it is a back-of-the-envelope analysis. The government admitted earlier that it does not have a target and it does not have any idea what the energy savings are going to be from this legislation. It does not have a target and it does not have a performance benchmark. It simply knows that there are 250 companies that cover around 40 per cent of Australia’s total energy use and that, by bringing this in, somehow we might reduce that energy use. There is no target and there is no modelling. We do not know what is being aimed at in the five years that we have got until the review. And now the government has told me that expanding the threshold to progressively include more and more companies that have energy usage of less than half a petajoule but more than 0.2 of a petajoule is going to impose a regulatory burden and insufficient energy savings. But it cannot identify what those savings are. It has got no idea. That is the fact of the matter. There is no documentation to support the government’s view. It is an ideological one which simply says, ‘We don’t think the regulatory burden is worth the effort. We’ve got no idea what amount of energy we could save or what amount of energy we will save,’ and the government is blocking this amendment.

In terms of broadening the agenda, when this legislation was first brought in we moved these amendments and the minister of the day, Senator Ian Campbell, could not answer our questions—just as Senator Colbeck cannot answer them today. We know that the minister personally tried to get the implementation of these audits and did not succeed. We are facing an ideological view about voluntary behaviour as opposed to regulatory mechanisms. There are no figures on the table to justify it, and history is going to judge the government very severely for failing to act at this time because it is so obvious that this is necessary. This is also rendering Australian business uncompetitive with overseas business. As the measures become more and more stringent in other countries, the levels of efficiency in those countries will get higher and Australian businesses will go out the back door—just as your refusal to have a mandatory vehicle fuel efficiency standard has driven the Australian car manufacturers to the brink whereby they are not competitive with China or the EU. The best they can do is use a government subsidy to re-tool and sell V8s into a US market where it is completely failing.

If you want to make Australian industry less efficient and less competitive with overseas, you are going the right way about it by sticking with the advice of certain members of the big business community—high energy users who do not want to be required to do anything and want to have the ease of a voluntary situation continue. It is simply not going to occur. The rest of the world is going to force us, whether Australia likes it or not. Tragically, when it does, our industries are going to be less efficient. I just wanted to get on the record that there is no documentation to justify the government’s position in relation to failing to extend the threshold. The government cannot indicate at all what levels of savings may be achieved by expanding the number of businesses and energy users. We have got no idea from the government. It just adopts a position of opposing it because it does not want to extend the number of businesses or the amount of energy covered that this threshold change would bring about.