Lisa Singh (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Shadow Attorney General) Share this | Hansard source

We know that Prime Minister Abbott is leading a government of yesterday's men, furiously advocating last century's ideas. We know that Prime Minister Abbott was always going to break the promises he told Greg Hunt to make about the coalition's commitment to keeping an unchanged renewable energy target. We know that the key points about these promises are not their clarity but their time frame. They were clear promises that the coalition made before the election, and every Australian knows by now the coalition's attitude to promises it made before the election.

We knew what the Prime Minister was planning when his office established the wrongly described 'independent review' of the RET, instead of taking expert advice from the Climate Change Authority's statute-mandated review of the RET. We knew what the Prime Minister was thinking, even though we knew his thinking was factually incorrect, when he blamed the RET for significant price pressures in the system—an opinion so inaccurate he must have borrowed it from Maurice Newman. We knew what the outcome of the review of the RET was going to be when the Prime Minister hand-picked an assortment of fossil-fuel boosters and climate-change sceptics to sit on the panel, but did not appoint anyone—not anyone—with any in-depth industry experience from the renewable energy sector. We knew the recommendations that the Prime Minister was demanding from the review when he refused to accept it in July and sent it back for more work to be done to illustrate the abolition of the renewable energy target.

I will admit that we did not know that the review would recommend the abolition or crippling of the renewable energy target because, despite its success, there are cheaper ways of abating carbon. For instance: an emissions trading scheme, which, being a market-based system, somehow goes against the coalition's new DNA; a carbon tax, which has been triumphantly abolished by Tony Abbott; and the purchase of international emissions permits, which Prime Minister Abbott also will not allow. We did not know that the review would describe the fact that the renewable energy target has created thousands of jobs and encouraged billions of dollars of investment as a problem, because it created too many jobs and encouraged too much investment. We cannot remember Dick Warburton ever describing the thousands of jobs created by the mining boom, and the billions of dollars invested in it, as a problem. No. We do know that about 96 per cent of Australia's 3,800 solar PV businesses are micro, small and medium-sized enterprises. And we do know that the solar small business industry took the Prime Minister at his word when he said that he would not axe or slash the renewable energy target.

The WA Renewable Energy Alliance has said killing off the subsidies could turn away thousands of customers who would have otherwise been expected to buy their systems. We know that in Australia's renewable energy powerhouse—my home state of Tasmania—Premier Will Hodgman is worried about the Commonwealth's response to the RET. We know he should be worried, because Hydro Tasmania has warned that any winding back of the renewable energy target would threaten its wind farm developments worth $2 billion, while the proponent of a $150 million wind farm at Granville Harbour, on the investment-poor west coast of Tasmania, has said both renewable energy target options place its project in jeopardy.

We know that no Australians will benefit from the options in the Warburton report, but, lo and behold, the review's modelling estimates that the big companies operating existing coal-fired power generators will enjoy financial gains of about $9.1 billion. We know that these profits will come from increased electricity costs for consumers. We know that, rather than support innovative, 21st century renewable energy technology, the Prime Minister and his government want our early 20th century fossil fuel infrastructure to extract every tonne of coal and every molecule of gas. This is despite the fact that the renewable energy target is already driving down Australia's carbon pollution. It is despite the fact that nearly five million Australians have embraced solar power because it protects their families and small businesses from soaring power bills. It is despite the fact that, as at 31 January this year, two million solar installations had been supported by the renewable energy target, meaning that 24 per cent—nearly one-quarter—of the 8.4 million occupied private dwellings in Australia have a solar system. It is despite the fact that abolishing the small-scale renewable energy target would make the installation of solar rooftop panels up to $1,200 more expensive. It is despite the fact that families living on lower incomes are much more likely to install solar than families living on higher incomes. It is despite the fact that two-thirds of Australians support the renewable energy target in its current form and that, of the 24,000 public submissions to the government's compromised review of the renewable energy target, less than one-quarter of one percent of those submissions favoured reducing the renewable energy target.

Despite all of that, Prime Minister Tony Abbott wants the renewable energy target dead. We know this. He has been listening too long to Maurice Newman and Dick Warburton's antiscience and antieconomics agenda. I want to remind Prime Minister Tony Abbott's antiscience and antienvironment government of one important point that it is either forgetting or completely ignoring in the policy debate about climate and environment policy—that is, there is no planet B. The Labor Party know this. We have not forgotten it, and we are not ignoring it. We understand that this is the only planet we have and that it has finite resources and a finite ability to absorb the waste from our exploitation of those resources. Prime Minister Abbott has already shifted the impact of the carbon price from the carbon polluters to the planet. He will now say nothing about the existence of an extra 240 million tonnes of carbon dioxide pollution or its $14 billion cost. Why would he? We know they did not worry about that sort of thing in the 1950s.