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

The Australian Greens will not be supporting these amendments to provide 100 per cent compensation or assistance to coal fired generators. We have been on the record, and continue to be on the record, as saying that we agree with Professor Garnaut that assistance is not required to provide energy security in Australia. This was a matter of intense debate as to whether coal fired generators, which have been one of the main drivers of greenhouse gas emissions in Australia, ought to be compensated. Surely, the basis needs to be how we keep energy security in Australia, because coal fired generators ought to have built into their business models some time ago the likelihood of carbon pricing. It is the failure to internalise the pollution from coal fired generators that is, in large part, giving us this massive problem across the planet. What the Greens argued was that we ought not to be compensating coal fired generators. They ought to have seen this coming—in fact, they have known it has been coming since the Kyoto protocol was signed. They have already built it into their whole business models, their shareholders know about it and frankly we think they are already given too much compensation—but that was part of the negotiations to get to the point we have reached. I argued, together with Professor Garnaut, that we did not need to compensate them to provide for energy security. However, the Australian electricity market operators wrote to the Multi-Party Climate Change Committee saying that they believed compensation was necessary in order to maintain confidence, if you like, from financial institutions. Hence, the issue is that we are ending up not with a worse environmental outcome but a waste of several billion dollars that, in the Greens' view, ought to be going to the transformation to the low-carbon economy, not propping up coal fired generation. It is not our job to maintain the equity in coal fired generators and prop up businesses that are last-century and have profited by the contamination of the atmosphere. So we certainly do not support increasing the compensation to coal fired generators.