Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Senator Fierravanti-Wells said that we could bring back solar panels. Senator, we should be producing them in this country. But the Howard government took the incentives away from the solar panel producing industries, and our excellent technology has been exported to Berlin and Beijing. I recently put a solar hot water service onto my house. It is Australian technology and manufactured in China. That is because the Howard government put hundreds of millions of dollars into the coal industry—wrong way—and took that support from the new solar panel producing industries that you talk about: the solar hot water services and other renewable energies.

I am afraid the same pattern of behaviour is happening under the current government. It undercuts the investment that should be going to ensuring that Australia becomes a powerhouse for new renewable energy, that it develops its own technology and becomes an exporter. Instead of that we have left it to cloudy Germany to be the exporter. I would add, and Senator Milne, if she were here, would be saying this: where are the feed-in laws that not only will make those solar panels you talk about good for households but will also produce money for them? If a person puts solar panels into their household, they produce electricity. When they are away on holidays, then they can feed it into the grid and, when they take it out of the grid, they should get three to four times more electricity than they paid for. That is how the German system works and that is why they have got the steal on the rest of the world.

One little anecdote on that is the pig farmer in Germany who thought he was not doing too well with pigs. In came feed-in laws, and he decided to cover his two hectare farm with solar panels. He now sits on the veranda watching the meter ticking over and makes money out of it. That is the way it should be going but Australia is way behind in that sort of thinking, and the Greens intend to continue to campaign to put us at the forefront.

But here we are dealing with what the big corporations want, legislation for facilitating their so-called carbon capture and storage somewhere down the line, perhaps decades down the line, not legislation to do the things we can do immediately to help small business in this country and to make an immediate impact on the reduction of carbon and other greenhouse gases pouring into the atmosphere due to lack of government action in this country.