Janet Rice (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

As I was discussing when we were interrupted in our previous debate on this bill, there are broadly two ways in which we can reduce the problems of not having sufficient supplies of liquid fuels. The way that the government is addressing it is to bring our supplies up to 90 days by having tickets on levels of fossil fuel stocks—oil stocks—elsewhere in the world. The other way—the much more significant, much more sustainable, much more strategic way—is to reduce our reliance on these oil supplies. If we can reduce our need to import oil, we are no longer as reliant on it. That is the way to achieve fuel security. By doing that, we're also, at the same time, tackling the huge issue of dangerous global warming. It's a win-win situation. It means that we are changing the types of fuels that we're using in the country and, simultaneously, Australia is doing its part to tackle global warming. It is significant because the transport sector accounts for three-quarters of Australia's liquid fuel demand and that sector is so ripe to have those fuels substituted.

There are two broad ways in which we can reduce the demand for liquid fossil fuels in the transport sector. One is to reduce overall the level of travel that's done in personal vehicles and in freight vehicles. The second is to substitute renewable fuels for fossil fuels. Reducing the amount of fuel-intensive travel overall means shifting some journeys away from personal car use and freight vehicles and to public transport and freight on rail and getting people to actively transport themselves by cycling and walking. All of these strategies are being used much more in other parts of the world. In other parts of the world, people don't have the huge reliance on personal motor vehicle travel that we have in Australia. Here in Australia, almost 90 per cent of our vehicle trips are done by motor vehicles where, basically, you've only got one person. Sometimes you've got two people, but, on average, it's only 1.1 person per vehicle. If we can just shift a small proportion of those trips to public transport or to walking and cycling, we will make a huge difference in the amount of fuel that we need to import.

Of course, there are other benefits. By doing that, not only are we tackling climate change and reducing our problems of being reliant on imported oil, we are also dealing significantly with congestion in our cities. The way you deal with congestion in the cities is to give people the choice of getting out of their cars. We're dealing with health as well. We know we have an obesity crisis in this country. We need to find ways to make our cities work so it easier and more straightforward for people to get exercise into their day. One of the most straightforward ways of doing that is to have active transport so that, when people are on their way to work, to the shops or to pick up the kids from school, they can do that by walking and cycling.

If, as well as investing in fuel substitution and paying money to have these fuel supplies in the world, we just invested a small amount in making it safe for people to walk and to ride bikes, this would have a very substantial and constructive impact on our overall fuel security. The thing that puts people off riding and makes them think, 'Oh, no, I'm not going to get on my bike,' isn't that it's something that they don't think that they could possibly do; it's that they don't feel safe riding. There is one sure-fire way to make people feel safe to ride their bikes, so that, once they've given it a go, they will give it a go again, and that is to give them safe cycling infrastructure. That's what's required. These are the sorts of initiatives that are required as part of a package, a suite of programs, to deal with increasing the resilience of our transport fuels.

The other big area, once you've shifted some trips away from personal vehicles and shifted some freight transport trips away from very polluting, high-fuel-use trucks to much less polluting, much more fuel efficient freight rail, is to look at the remainder of the vehicle trips. That's when you get into working out what the long-term future is for those remaining car trips and truck trips. How can we get the triple whammy where we've got fuel security, we're tackling climate change and we're dealing with air pollution in our country? The way to do that—all the evidence points to it—is to push to have much greater use of renewable fuels, much greater uptake of electric vehicles and a shift to the use of hydrogen in freight vehicles. These are the sorts of initiatives, the sorts of measures, that other countries around the world are taking up with gusto—but not Australia. We are stuck in the last century, stuck with this absolutely dogged attachment to oil, gas and coal.

We know why that is. The vested interests have got the government in their pocket. The government is just saying to the oil companies, the coal companies and the gas companies, 'Anything that you want, you can get it.' That's why we haven't had the initiatives to have electric vehicle uptake here in Australia. We're one of the worst performers in the world when it comes to electric vehicle uptake. We know all the benefits of electric vehicles. They're cheaper to refuel. They're much more fuel efficient due to the efficiency of electric motors. They're cheaper to operate and maintain. And, as I said, they're much better for the climate—but particularly better for the climate when they are running on renewable energy, which is the other part of the equation—and much better for health. There are so many reasons why we should be investing in electric vehicles, but we are lagging behind because of the government being wedded to the fossil fuel industries. If we just had some small initiatives to encourage the use of electric vehicles, then we would have that uptake in their usage. We could be in a situation like the UK, France and other countries, where they have said they are going to be phasing out fossil fuel vehicles by 2030 or 2040. They are planning for it. They know that it makes sense. But here in Australia we are just stuck in the last century.

There is another thing that we are not doing where we've got these existing fossil fuel vehicles. If we put measures in place so that we are increasing the uptake of electric vehicles, with all of the benefits that that's going to have, we know that in the transition period there will be ongoing use and ongoing sale of fossil fuel engines—petrol and diesel engines. At the very least, if we are concerned about reducing our reliance on fossil fuel and increasing our fuel security, we need to be doing something about emissions standards. In the world market, 80 per cent of light vehicles that are sold have standards when it comes to CO2 emissions, but Australia is falling behind. We are becoming a dumping ground for vehicles that have high emissions and low fuel economy.

These are the measures that we need to be acting on, which the government flagged a few months ago but now seems to be backtracking on, unwilling to take the action that's required by insisting that vehicles must have high-quality fuel-emission standards. Such action would we save people money as well. Vehicles with very high fuel efficiency don't use as much fuel, so you don't need to pay for as much petrol or diesel to put into your car. Yes, there's a small up-front cost for having more fuel-efficient vehicles, but the payback period is less than five years. It's cheaper for consumers, good for our environment, good for climate and good for our resilience and for having fuel security in this country. Having higher emission standards would reduce our carbon dioxide emissions by the same amount as taking every car and truck off the road for a year. By 2030, that's how much we would reduce our carbon emissions.

If we had a government that was serious about dealing with our transport sector emissions, fuel security and global warming, it's this package of emissions that would be adopted. But, instead, there's no plan. We've got a government that isn't serious about reducing oil imports, increasing energy security or working out how to decarbonise our transport system and move it away from oil, gas and coal. It's a package of measures that we need. If we had a shift into electric vehicles to seriously reduce the carbon pollution that comes from our transport system, those electric vehicles would need to be fuelled by renewable energy—clean, green solar, wind, geothermal and hydro energy. But, although it might be grudgingly dragged into electric vehicles down the track, the government is still committed to coal fuelling our power systems. We have a massive commitment to coal, as with the Adani coal mine, which the government and the Labor Party are still supporting, and now we've got the government talking about throwing a billion dollars at trying to maintain a dirty, polluting, coal-fired power station—the Liddell power station.

Just think: rather than trying to extend the life of a power station that is polluting the local area and polluting the globe, if you took the sort of money going into the subsidies that the government's now talking about and spent them on encouraging renewable energy, electric vehicles and other initiatives that are going to lead us to a clean, sustainable transport sector, that would create the win-win-win-wins that would drive our transport system in the direction that it needs to go. The Greens will continue to fight for this. We will continue to push for cleaner air, cleaner transport and more fuel security, and I ask the government and the Labor Party to look at the evidence and to look at what makes sense—what the transport planners around the country are saying and what the scientists around the country are saying—and let us shift to a cleaner, greener transport system.