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

I rise today to speak on what I regard as an extremely urgent matter of public importance, and that is the critical nature of the need to reduce our greenhouse gases and make the transition to a low-carbon economy as quickly as we possibly can. In order to do that, we need a gross national feed-in tariff. This debate has been going on in the Senate for some years. I have moved legislation in here and we have had a debate on that legislation. The debate has been suspended. We have not had a vote on it yet, but it is critical that we do it. The reason for this is that in every other country where there has been an explosion in renewable energy it has been because they have brought in a gross feed-in tariff.

If you want to see an example of the poor framework for supporting renewables in Australia compared with overseas, look at what happened in Australia only last week: Solar Systems went into voluntary administration. They were scheduled to build a large-scale new-technology plant at Mildura and they went into voluntary administration. In the same week, First Solar, an American company, announced a decision to build a two-gigawatt solar power station in China. This is what the Chief Executive Officer of First Solar, Mike Ahearn, had to say:

The Chinese feed-in tariff will be critical to this project ...

He went on to say:

This type of forward-looking government policy is necessary to create a strong solar market and facilitate the construction of a project of this size, which in turn continues to drive the cost of solar electricity closer to ‘grid parity’—where it is competitive with traditional energy sources.

Frankly, I could not have put it better myself. China is going ahead with large-scale renewables because of its feed-in tariff. Japan last week announced its intention of going to a 25 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and the introduction of a feed-in tariff to support that initiative. In the UK, where they have gone to a 34 per cent target to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the government has acknowledged that its certificate system, which the Australian government has based its renewable energy certificates on, is not working like feed-in tariffs work and so the UK is going to go to a feed-in tariff. In France there is a feed-in tariff. In Germany there is a feed-in tariff. Why is it that in Australia we cannot and will not learn that the best way to support the bringing on of renewable energy technologies is through a gross feed-in tariff?

The legislation that I introduced into the Senate was referred to an inquiry. There were more than 125 submissions to that inquiry and at least 120 of them supported a gross national feed-in tariff. All of them said it was silly to have different jurisdictions in different states, that we needed a national arrangement and that it needed to be a gross tariff. How does it work? A gross tariff works whereby you give a fixed price for a fixed volume of energy that you produce over a fixed period of time. You can go to the bank and borrow the money in order to invest in a project because you know exactly what your return is going to be for 20 years. That is why in Germany we saw farmers go out and borrow the money to cover their winter barns, for example, with renewables—because they knew what their return would be over 20 years and the bankers could see that they could cover the repayments as a result of that.

In Australia we have rural communities desperate for a gross feed-in tariff because, particularly on some of those large properties in outback Australia, they can see huge potential for leasing part of their property or going into a joint venture arrangement with renewable companies to build large-scale solar thermal or wind energy plants on their properties and to make money from the climate instead of being constantly stressed by the climate because it is undermining what they used to do on those properties. So it is good for Australia. It is good for the Australian economy. It is good for the transition to a low-carbon economy. It helps to build manufacturing, because once you get the national gross feed-in tariff you will get investment in those technologies.

Solar Systems fell over, went into voluntary administration, because it could not raise the capital. Why could it not raise the capital? Because there is no economic framework in Australia to support large-scale renewables. The renewable energy target does nothing to bring on solar thermal, to bring on wave power or to bring on geothermal. There is no arrangement in Australia to bring on those technologies. In the absence of a gross feed-in tariff, it is not going to happen. We will see increasingly that not only do we need to have the economic framework in place for the national gross feed-in tariff but governments need to invest in the grid so that there is an intelligent grid going out to areas where the private sector will invest in these large-scale facilities. That is why they have done so well in Germany.

Just today I worked with Greenpeace International on the release of a report. They say in their report that if Australia is serious about maximising the potential of renewable power and clean energy job creation, it will introduce a national gross metered feed-in tariff for renewable energy technologies. It is that clear, that obvious. The jobs are there—250,000 jobs in renewables in Germany. There are now many more jobs in renewables than there ever were in coalmines in Germany. They are much more sophisticated jobs and they are exporting the technologies. If you go to Denmark, you see that a requirement of their wind industry is that they use Danish technology. They support the technologies, the rollout of the technologies, and then they sell the second-hand turbines overseas while they take on the latest technologies themselves.

It is clever. It is investment in new technology, in new manufacturing, in new jobs, in skills upgrading—in everything. In fact, there is no downside to a national gross feed-in tariff. So, if there is no downside, why is the government so studiously refusing to allow it to happen? Why did it drive it to COAG to get the lowest common denominator outcome? Why is it that the only people objecting to a national gross feed-in tariff were the federal government, the government of South Australia and the large industrial generators like the coal sector? The only answer to that could be: the faith that the government places in coal and its desperate need to keep channelling all of the money. They say that they do not pick winners; well, they did. They have picked a winner and that is carbon capture and storage, which does not exist.

Premier Bligh’s latest notion of her coal-fired power station in Queensland with CCS is a joke—it is just another coal-fired power station minus CCS, which is the green gloss to try to pretend that there is some technology in sight. One can only assume that the Prime Minister, Mr Rudd, and the Minister for Climate Change and Water, Senator Wong, are so intent—along with the Minister for Resources and Energy, Mr Ferguson—on holding up the rollout of renewables in Australia in order to wait for so-called clean coal to come on board that they are prepared to do anything, even if it means undermining the jobs.

Greenpeace modelling shows that, by 2020, ‘By maximising Australia’s potential for renewable energy, Australia can have 33,900 jobs in the renewable power sector alone.’ That is pretty impressive, and they have modelled that by considering the total number of jobs in construction and installation, manufacturing, operational and maintenance and fuel supply. The breakdown of that is that there are 10,700 jobs in photovoltaics, 6,400 jobs in wind, 5,200 jobs in bioenergy, 1,800 jobs in geothermal, 6,900 jobs in solar thermal, 900 jobs in ocean and 2,000 jobs in the hydro sector across the country. That is the kind of potential that we are missing out on.

We must have this tariff in Australia. The House of Representatives will have a chance to vote on this tonight when Rob Oakeshott introduces my legislation there. But this Senate has the opportunity to pass this, and I would be keen to hear from anyone in here who can tell me why it is that Australia will not adopt the very framework that has worked so well in so many other countries overseas in generating jobs, new manufacturing industries and new exports. I thought that was what we were trying to do in Australia, rather than driving those people overseas. That is what has happened with solar heat and power, with Zhengrong Shi and with so many of our best and brightest leaving the country while we simply focus on digging more holes and filling them in again with so-called carbon capture and storage.