Scott Ludlam (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

It is with a sense of dismay that I rise tonight to speak on this bill, the Renewable Energy (Electricity) Amendment Bill 2015, because this debate did not need to occur. What we are seeing here is the expression of the Abbott government's opinion that Australia is running the risk, out to the year 2020, of having too much renewable energy, too much clean energy on our network and that that is an enormous problem that needs to be dealt with by bringing forward legislation.

We know for an absolute fact, because they told us—they do not even try to hide it any more; for a little while they did, but now they have got so drunk on whatever it is they are up to in their party room that they just say it flat out—that they wanted to completely abolish the renewable energy target, just like they wanted to knock over the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and abolish ARENA and any of the mainstays of this industry in getting it on its feet so that it can employ people, drive down greenhouse gas emissions and set us up for the electricity generation industry of the future. The Abbott government has been absolutely, almost forensically, determined to wipe it out. That is what brings us to this debate tonight.

Can you imagine people in future times looking back on this debate to discover a government doing everything in its power to prevent us from an oversupply of clean energy when the rest of the world is doing the opposite—albeit in fits and starts because there are people like Prime Minister Tony Abbott in all those other countries as well. In Saudi Arabia, in Canada and in other places; in the United States, various Tea Party operatives in the pay of fossil fuel industries: such people are scattered throughout the industrialised world. But imagine looking back in the Australian context and realising that the government had set out to prevent us from having too much clean energy. It is absolutely unbelievable. Trying to bankrupt clean energy companies and throw people out of work shows not simply indifference but active hostility to renewable energy.

What it amounts to, though, when you try and work out exactly what is going on here, is that the Australian electricity network is dramatically overbuilt. Apparently, we have built 9,000 megawatts or nine gigawatts of capacity that this country does not need. Basically, we have built too many generators, based on uncritical hallucinations about future energy demand—that it was just going to keep growing and growing; that energy efficiency would never play a part; that home solar would never play any kind of part; that, at a household level, people would not start getting serious about doing their bit. But that is all happening. It was thought that we would simply continue to grow forever, so we have this extraordinary overcapacity.

In WA, it amounts to an estimated $1 billion worth of generators that we do not need, with more than $300 million spent on resurrecting the old, polluting Muja coal fired power station just outside of Collie. You might as well have just shovelled 300 million bucks into the boiler and torched it. This is under the same Barnett government that, while it is not entirely responsible—because some of this stuff has a fairly long lead time—has presided over the destruction of the state's finances, with the loss of its triple A credit rating. They are now crying poor. They have abandoned public transport projects and all sorts of other projects because the state's finances are in ruins, having spent more than $1 billion on electricity generators that we do not need.

This is where we start to get a bit of a hint about what the Abbott government is up to. What exactly do we think is the motivation of the Abbott government in exercising such forensic hostility in trying to wipe out this industry? If you go looking for motive, you could be forgiven for not looking any further than Mr Maurice Newman, who is the Chairman of the Prime Minister's Business Advisory Council. This is not some nut-case blogger ranting on the Infowars website; this is the guy who runs the Prime Minister's Business Advisory Council. He has said:

This is not about facts or logic. It's about a new world order under the control of the UN.

He thinks it is effectively about some kind of communist de-industrialisation of Western powers as part of some strange, manifest agenda that is never quite spelt out. 'It's about a new world order under the control of the United Nations.' This is somebody whose advice the Prime Minister take seriously. But I think we need to look a bit further than Mr Newman.

I think we could take Mr Abbott's comments to Alan Jones on the radio the other day at face value. For obvious reasons, other senators have also quoted those comments in this debate. He said:

What we did recently in the Senate was reduce, Alan, reduce, capital R-E-D-U-C-E—

I guess he spelt it out. I did not hear the interview myself; I could not bear it—

we reduced the number of these things that we're going to get in the future. Now, I would frankly have liked to have reduced the number a lot more—

he is talking about wind installations. And then Alan pats him on the head, saying:

Good—well, you're the boss.

Mr Abbott continued:

But we got the best deal we could out of the Senate. And if we hadn't had a deal, Alan, we would have been stuck with even more of these things.

The renewable energy industry, trying to negotiate in good faith with these people to get a better outcome, are getting certainty; they are getting certainty—and this is why I think it has been a mistake to try and bargain for a reduction in the renewable energy target—that the government is trying to wipe them out. The government is trying to put them out of business.

In the Western Australian context, that effectively means the loss of about 1,000 jobs, and I will put some figures to you now about how we arrived at that number. This government has effectively, through their renewable energy policies and in conjunction with their state Liberal and National colleagues, destroyed 1,000 jobs in Western Australia: a slow clap for you all! From a peak of under 1,500 jobs in solar and 360 in wind, we have fallen to around 730 in solar and 50 in wind in 2013-14. You destroyed 1,000 jobs in an industry that we urgently need to get on its feet because of the employment potential of getting the local manufacturing sector up and running. In WA, with the end of the mining-construction boom and the settling into the operations phase, people are leaving northern towns in droves and they are leaving regional areas, and sections of the Western Australian economy are beginning to cave in. You would think that this government that prides itself on its economic credentials would be doing everything that it can to support new industries of the future. I do not know what the national figures are; others senators will speak to those. But you have destroyed 1,000 jobs in Western Australia. Congratulations!

The Climate Council has shown that, over the last year, global employment in renewables grew by 13 per cent and, in Australia, renewable energy jobs fell by roughly the same amount. The International Energy Agency reports that renewable energy continues to rank as 'the fastest growing power source'; yet, in 2014, investment in Australia fell by 35 per cent overall and 88 per cent in large-scale projects.

So, this is not just rhetoric, a kind of unhinged rhetoric, from people like Mr Maurice Newman. This is actually deadly serious. This is industry policy playing out. This is very large donors in the oil, gas and coal industries who bankrolled the government into office and basically bought the executive of a major political party now carrying out their agenda—and it is sketched out in reasonable detail in the IPA's hit list of 100 things they would like to see done to the country—almost forensically and destroying an industry competitor. This is not because renewable energy is a failure, not because it is too expensive and not because it does not work. It is because it works too well—not just overseas, but right here in Australia. WA is the second highest greenhouse polluter per capita after the Northern Territory, and, thanks to the Barnett government, when we abolished the state-based renewable energy target from 2011-12 greenhouse gas emissions in Western Australia are set to double. This is over a period of time when Mr Hunt thinks he can waive his hand magically and somehow see us be brought into line with out international commitments.

In 2011 the state government also scrapped the feed-in tariff scheme for homeowners who installed solar panels. We just produced, at home, our second annual iteration of the solar postcodes report, which maps something a little bit unusual—something that is a bit counterintuitive—for Western Australia. It is that Western Australian households, with other families from around the country, want to do the right thing. They want to do the right thing for environmental reasons, but, significantly, for cost reasons as well. I guess the myth, at least from the Liberal-National side of the chamber, is that clean energy and home-installed power stations—rooftop PV—is a plaything of the wealthy. But when you look at the numbers for the families and the households in Western Australia that are installing solar PV it is inversely correlated with the median wealth of the postcode. It is low income and outer-metropolitan suburbs that are doing their bit, and it is the government that has actually become the block. It is not simply indifference at work here. It is hostility. And we know why. It is because renewable energy is competing a little bit too well with the people who helped put you into office. We are talking about 1,080 jobs in WA alone.

Around the country the writing is on the wall. It is happening around the world as well, but we have seen some pretty vivid examples here in Australia in the last little while. Coal is on its way out. It is not that it is good for humanity. Go to Morwell in the middle of the fire—you could not breathe the air—and tell people how good coal is for humanity. The Greens have gone to the Victorian, Queensland and New South Wales state elections talking about and proposing a structured, phased closure of coal power that keeps the workforce engaged and employed through staged rehabilitation of mine sites, while you can start training people and working for a transition. There is no reason at all why the sites of the coalmines and the big generators in Australia, whether it be in the Hunter, in the Latrobe or in Collie in Western Australia, cannot be the sites of the clean energy technologies of the future, because no-one in their right mind is going to walk away from billions of dollars worth of sunk costs in transmission infrastructure in each of those three places. This is where we can be generating the renewable jobs of the future. But the government has its back turned, not through—as far as I can tell—any kind of strategic assessment of where energy reform in this country needs to go, but through simple, blind pigheadedness and refusal to admit that the world has changed.

Coalmines are closing anyway. In the last month and a half we have seen Anglesea close in Victoria and Alinta's Leigh Creek plants close in South Australia. Before that, it was Redbank, in New South Wales. Who is it going to be next? Maybe it will be Hazelwood. If you do not have a transition plan for the workforce they are thrown on the discard pile. Why is it that we are the only people talking about a structured transition for these workforces, rather than abandoning them to the inevitability that the industry is on its way out—not because of government policy, but despite it? They are being outcompeted by electricity generators that need no fuel. Once the capital is installed they run for virtually nothing. That is the game changer that you appear to have failed to understand. That is why we stand here tonight debating the destruction or the attempted sabotage of the clean energy sector—not through any kind of mysterious ideology, but, I think, through the hardheaded business pragmatism of the dying industries of coal and those in the gas industry who think they are some kind of viable replacement because they are slightly less bad than coal.

Who gets to be collateral damage along the way? It is the native forest ecosystems of this country. This is a plan that will increase logging in out native forest estate. This is something that I speak about from direct experience in Western Australia, having been involved in the very late stages of the campaign to get the chainsaws, the bulldozers and the scrub rollers out of the old-growth forests in the south-west of Western Australia. Most Western Australians thought that was case closed. And good on the Gallop government, with the support of the Greens at the time in 2001, for actually bringing an end to very large-scale clear-felling in the old-growth forest estate in the karri forest and in the jarrah forest. Most Western Australians figured that was case closed and that the job was done. They walked away and they had a rest. People had been working on that campaign for 30 years, and they went off and did other stuff. In the meantime, the destruction of our native forest continued in smaller pockets and in areas arguably not considered technically old growth, because they might have been logged by a handsaw 60 years ago. The destruction continued of the forest ecosystems that support the wildlife, support the rainfall patterns and ultimately support the biodiversity that supports us and supports our economy. And this area in Western Australia we are speaking of is one of just 31 global biodiversity hot spots. The south-west forests of Western Australia are like nowhere else in the world, and we are seeing localised extinction cascades already. It is predicted that at current rates of habitat loss we will see Carnaby's Cockatoo become extinct by 2020. As it is in Western Australia, the current forest management plan will see the rate of logging increase—not decrease, but increase—into these dying markets in these customer countries that just do not want our woodchips any more, to an area equivalent to 10,000 Subiaco Ovals every year and an impact of around 200 square kilometres of native forest to be hit.

No wonder people are establishing blockade camps. People are mobilising and getting organised again to create some kind of defence against the insanity of industrialised logging. And just as we start to get to the point where we can have an intelligent conversation about a mature transition plan—there is that phrase again—to a plantation logging estate, what comes along but a proposal to feed native forest logs into incinerators. This is a perverse redefinition of renewable energy that has fooled absolutely nobody. This is nothing to do with forest waste, unless you are happy with the concept of 10 per cent of mature, old karri forest being knocked over and sent off for sawlog, and the other 90 per cent of those forest coupes being fed into chip-mills, pulped and burnt. Do you really consider 90 per cent to be waste?

The forest movement and the WA Forest Alliance—and I want to acknowledge their extraordinarily longstanding commitment, and that of their allies, the local people in the South West towns, to the defence of the native forests of the South West of WA—have recorded trees in excess of 300 years old. Trees older than the foundation of the city of Perth are being fed into chip-mills as waste and pulped. That is what we are dealing with. Trees that you cannot get your arms around—trees that five or six or seven people could not encircle—are being classified as waste, chipped and burned. What kind of government brings forward that proposal and perversely describes it as renewable energy? This has nothing to do with waste—at least not in the sense that you mean it; it is certainly wasteful in another sense.

Given that that is the package on the table, who in their right minds would support the Abbott government in this mad endeavour to destroy the clean energy sector just as it is starting to find its feet, and to sign off on the destruction of the native forests—not just those in the South West corner that I am particularly attached to, but the wild forests of East Gippsland, the rainforests of Tasmania, and the tall forests of New South Wales—who would throw the government that lifeline? Who indeed? Enter the Australian Labor Party. After listening to some of the speeches that ALP senators have delivered tonight—heartfelt, and no doubt sincere—you could be forgiven for thinking that the ALP was going to vote against this bill. But you are not; you are going to vote for it. You have thrown Prime Minister Tony Abbott a lifeline.

Having described at some length what is at stake, and the consequences, I can understand that, for a party that did everything it could to prevent the Clean Energy Act from coming into existence, and from a Prime Minister who said he wished that the Renewable Energy Target had never been legislated for, they have put their cards pretty clearly on the table—they are ambiguous and confused and pretty messed up on all sorts of other things, but they are crystal clear on the subject of what they think of the clean energy sector. But what on earth has got into the Labor Party that it would throw the government this lifeline? I have not heard that from any of the Labor senators who have chosen to speak to this bill.

We will be opposing this bill. When it gets to the committee stage, we will see what kinds of amendments are brought forward; I gather there is all sorts of churn, and that the amendments are still being frantically hacked. Why don't you adjourn this debate, take a very deep breath, and think about—not future generations, because it has become very apparent that you could not care less, but what about the present generation of young people—people who are coming through: kids of age five or six. Try and think about how they will feel in the 2050s and 2060s and 2070s, when they are our age—it is not that far away—if they pick up the transcripts from tonight's Hansard and read about the time that the Australian government, with the support of the opposition, legislated against the possibility of installing too much clean energy.

There is still time for a rethink. And I really hope, for the sake of the young people in all of our lives and the young people in the lives of those who might be following this debate from outside, that there is a rethink—that we come to our senses collectively as a legislature, and do what is demanded of us; that we move forward with the transition, that we do not dig our heels in and try and cling to a past that we have well and truly outlived. It is time to move on. Protecting and extending the Renewable Energy Target and guaranteeing the expansion of this industry and the jobs that it can provide—that is our job. That is what we should be doing in here—not clinging onto the technologies of the past that have brought us such risk; such extraordinary present-day and near-future risk.