Peter Whish-Wilson (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on behalf of the Australian Greens today in relation to Senator Leyonhjelm's private members' bill, A New Tax System (Goods and Services Tax) Amendment (Make Electricity GST Free) Bill 2017.

I will start by indicating that we will be supporting this bill. The Greens have been very clear for over a decade now that we don't support a broad-based, blanket, untargeted goods and services tax on the Australian people, especially on low-income Australian people, so we're happy to support Senator Leyonhjelm. Had we had more time or had this gone to committee, we may have talked to Senator Leyonhjelm about how we could target this more specifically—for example, to low-income households or renters. We do feel that there should be some price incentives in place in the electricity market to reflect the externalities of climate change and, for example, the burning of dirty fossil fuels. So, while we would support the removal of a broad-based, untargeted, progressive tax—it just makes life harder for low-income Australians—we do as a party have a very strong view on supporting a price on pollution. We feel that the revenue raised through a price on pollution—such as we saw in this country before it was cynically and ruthlessly removed by Mr Tony Abbott and his Liberal government—is a better way to accurately reflect the prices in the electricity market. So we support a targeted tax like a carbon price and would see the revenue raised from that potentially substituting for the loss of revenues to the Commonwealth for removing a goods and services tax.

Let's be frank about this. We're talking about giving relief, especially to low-income Australians, by removing the GST on power. Let's call it that. Let's just say on electricity bills. Why is it needed? Electricity prices under this Liberal government, as we heard in this chamber yesterday, have nearly doubled. So much for the sky falling in when the carbon price was introduced in this place. In fact, since it was removed, the little daisy ring that was run in the other place with Mr Greg Hunt and others celebrating the loss of the carbon price because we suddenly were going to relieve Australian households of this burden of their higher electricity bills has proven to be hollow and laughable. So we have this situation now in our energy market where energy prices are going through the roof. We're having political spats over the distribution mix of power with base loads.

Ironically, we've had a debate in this place in recent days about the government and its messaging about the Labor Party and their pre-1989 eastern European economic and industrial policies—their socialist and communist policies. It's actually the Liberal Party that's looking to interfere in the capitalist energy market by talking about buying coal-fired power stations or coalmines or by giving low-interest loans, which the Productivity Commission said in estimates to me was effectively a subsidy to foreign coal barons who want to build new coalmines. So here we have the government looking to implement their own eastern European policies and interfering in the energy market. And for what purpose? Is it really, as the Prime Minister says or Senator Birmingham said in here yesterday, to give us reliability in our energy market here in Australia? There are so many other ways we could have reliability in our energy market, especially in base-load power. Or is it more a cynical political tactic: short-term, self-interested politics for the Liberal government to make sure they don't lose votes in marginal seats in Queensland and New South Wales to One Nation? That's what this is. The climate policy and energy policy in this country at the moment are being dictated by the survival of Mr Malcolm Turnbull and the LNP going into a federal election.

'Too much renewable energy', 'flip it on its head', 'coal is good', 'we need more coal'—as Senator McGrath said in here yesterday, 'coal is good for you'—what is all this nonsense about? What is this messaging, like the Treasurer holding up a piece of coal as a prop in the other place, all about? Call me cynical, but I do live on planet politics, especially while I'm here in Canberra. This is all about a short-term political strategy to not lose votes to One Nation. Since they have been in this place, One Nation have been totally out of the closet about supporting the coal industry. They're climate deniers; they're unafraid. Senator Roberts is out and proud about believing that man-made climate change is rubbish. And he's a big supporter of the coal industry, as are his colleagues. That resonates in parts of Australia, and I understand why that would resonate in towns that rely on employment from coalmines and coal-fired power stations. I totally get that.

I chaired the environment committee that went around the country and took evidence on this. I said at the time that, as politicians, we have a duty to show leadership on transitioning this country away from dirty coal-fired power stations to base loads that we know can be filled with renewable energy. We need a plan to transition those workers, to retrain them. We know that renewable energy is jobs rich, especially when we start looking at the disruption that's coming to the grid around battery storage and household solar, which I have no doubt at all will make the grid virtually redundant in many ways in our lifetimes, possibly even in the next five to 10 years. We are seeing big changes coming to the electricity markets, whether we want them or not.

Let me tell you: it's not about coal; it's actually about people wanting to have energy independence, to not be dependent on the AGLs and the other big companies of the world. As a Greens senator, I get asked about this all the time by people who meet me—it might be a taxi driver or whoever—because it's something we've got in common, and they say: 'Senator, I've got a new household solar system. I looked at it yesterday and I'm generating all this power. Every day, I can't wait to have a look at how much I've been generating.' It's something they have in common with me, as a Green. But often when I get to the bottom of it, what I find really interesting is their motivation for getting the rooftop solar and putting in place new battery storage systems. The motivation is not necessarily that they want to save the planet and reduce emissions; the motivation is they want to be independent of the grid or power companies. It's almost a Tea Party attitude, which I find quite interesting as a Green. They're supporting us, but really what they want is to be independent and to give the big power companies the bird, to say: 'I generate my own power. I can store it. I'm not reliant on you. I don't want to pay your bloody fees, and this and that.' Good. If it's good for the planet, then I support that.

These changes are coming and I reckon they're unstoppable. We're already seeing millions of household solar power systems operating around this country, and there are more to come. Why are we having this debate about the federal government interfering in the market by buying coal-fired power stations? Why are we having this debate about governments supporting some of the biggest coal mines in the world, like those being proposed for the Galilee Basin in Queensland? It's politics. It's cynical, short-term politics.

But if you walk down the street in any town in this country and you ask people what they really care about, and what they want politicians to do, they want us to help solve their problems. They want new ideas. They want us to actually be constructive, and they will tell you that electricity prices are too high. Of course, it's a very complex debate as to why that's the case, but we support the intention of this bill, which is to remove GST and give some relief to households. To give relief to renters, who rely on landlords to put in place energy efficiency systems or renewable energy systems, which won't necessarily happen if those costs are being covered by their renters, and to give relief to low-income Australians, who may not necessarily be able to afford their own home. Even those Australians who can afford to buy their own home and who are suffering from mortgage stress, and we know there are way too many of those for our liking, are struggling with power prices.

The flipside of that is that we, as the Greens party, want to balance incentives that allow people to put in place their own renewable energy generation systems, or move the generation mix in this country towards clean renewable energy. There have to be some pricing signals to make that happen. If you own your own home and you're wealthy, or you're an investor who owns up to eight homes, as can be the case in this country—we would have liked to have seen GST relief on power prices being targeted to those who directly need it, but we haven't got the time to go into that. If we truly want to make an impact on global warming, then we need to do a lot more than we already are. So while we support removing GST, we would also support very strong action on curbing the emissions that are leading to global warming.

I know some senators watch 24-hour news coverage—ABC News 24, or Sky if you're in the Liberal Party. If you go back to your offices, have a look at your screens. You're likely to see images of the biggest hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic, Hurricane Irma, and tracking charts. This is just a week after Hurricane Harvey, which is now officially the biggest natural disaster in US history. What have those two events got in common? It's a bit more simple than most people think. Hurricane Harvey, before it made landfall, was expected to diminish in size and intensity, but it didn't do that—quite the opposite. Against all expectations and against all modelling, it increased in intensity just before it made landfall. Why did it do that? The answer is simple—because of warming oceans. The ocean temperatures were much higher than predicted.

Sadly, for those people in Haiti and Cuba and other countries that are getting battered, Irma is a storm that meteorologists never thought could happen. It has exceeded the maximum theoretical speeds in their models. Why? The same reason—ocean temperatures are higher than their models could have predicted. What is it about warming oceans and hurricanes? What is it about warming oceans and coral bleaching? What is it about warming oceans and floods and droughts? The oceans dictate our global weather systems, and warming oceans are directly correlated to rising global carbon emissions. While Irma is making its way to the US—very possibly to break another US record since climate records were begun, with two category 4 hurricanes hitting in the same year, let alone in back-to-back weeks, with unprecedented wind speeds and rainfall—another two storm systems are now forming behind Irma that look like they are also going to become hurricanes. This is literally off the charts.

As I found during the recent Senate committee visit to the Great Barrier Reef, there are unprecedented warming events in our oceans. I support our climate scientists and all the great work they do, even though this government has tried to sack the lot of them in the last couple of years, but their modelling predicted that these kinds of events couldn't happen till 2040 or 2050. They're happening now. This is global warming happening now. What are we doing about it? Even if we meet our Paris global emissions targets, or have even deeper cuts to global emissions leading into Paris—I suppose even the most optimistic of us don't necessarily believe that could happen—we're still going to get 15 years of warming oceans locked in from our current emissions trajectory. Think of what is happening around the world now, including in our own country. We have mortality to half the Barrier Reef, one of the biggest living organisms on the planet, because of warming oceans. You can stick your head in the sand, but I challenge every senator in here to go and stick their head under the water at the Great Barrier Reef and see what is happening. You can't avoid seeing the effects of global warming.

So, while we're talking about the need to put policies in place to provide relief to low-income Australians, we need to be very clear that we need legislation and the right incentives, the right price signals, to reflect the externality that is climate change and the horrific damage it's doing all around the world. We have heard a lot about Harvey in the US, and rightly so—the damage bill is in the hundreds of billions of dollars already. You can laugh about climate change and stick your head in the sand, but these events cause economic damage as well as social and environmental damage. We have seen in Bangladesh 1,200 people die from record floods. This is not just happening in Australia and in the Atlantic; this is happening all around the world. We need a system that correctly prices the externality of climate change if we're going to fix it.

I will now finish up—probably much to all senators' relief—and say we'll be supporting this bill. The Greens would still like to see a price on carbon that reflects the damage that climate change is doing to our environment, to our communities and to our economy.