Michelle Ananda-Rajah (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

That old chestnut—yes, I do remember it; we keep receipts. We would not be having this conversation at all. In fact, what would be happening today is the dead hand of government would be retreating and the free market would take over—the most efficient mechanism. The carbon tax would now be running in our economy and the free market would be cleaning up this mess, and we wouldn't be in this place right now. But that's not the reality, because the Greens, in their wisdom back then, in their search for perfection, ruled out the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme.

What are we left with? We're left with second-order and third-order policies, and we are doing our level best as a government. We legislated an emissions target—82 per cent renewable energy by 2030. According to the Climate Change Authority, we're on track to meet that. We're within striking distance, but it's not easy. We have headwinds.

In Australia, we have also got—and this is something to be genuinely proud of—the highest uptake of rooftop solar in the world; 4.1 million households have taken up rooftop solar. That is thanks to a Labor government setting a renewable energy target years and years ago. We are reaping the benefits. To all of those people who do not believe in targets: targets matter; they do matter. As a government, we brought in tax breaks for electric vehicle uptake, and what we have seen is a surge in electric vehicle uptake. When we came in, sales were at a moribund two per cent; they are now at 13 per cent. We have 300,000 electric vehicles on the road today, plus a whole bunch of plug-in hybrids. We also brought in efficiency standards for new vehicles, helping Australians gain access to the most fuel-efficient vehicles—also reducing our emissions.

Then we have the home battery scheme, a complete runaway success, which has exceeded all our expectations. A total of 30,000 home batteries have been taken up by Australians since 1 July. That's a thousand batteries per day. Australians get it. They want to reduce their bills. They want to reduce their emissions. We're giving them the opportunity to do so. On top of that, we're also looking at how we help heavy industry and the high emitters in this country decarbonise. We brought in the safeguard mechanism, which the Greens political party also supported. It enabled our largest emitters in the country to get onto the path of net zero by reducing their emissions by five per cent year on year on year. That's not easy for them, but they are now compelled to do so.

We also brought in the Capacity Investment Scheme. What is that? That is basically a government backed scheme to increase large-scale solar and wind generation in this country backed by storage. This has been, again, a huge success. It has been wildly popular to the point where we have increased its ceiling to 40 gigawatts by 2030. We've had interest from industry which has outstripped the tender process. We've also allocated offshore wind zones around the country and committed $27 billion in production credits for industry to help create green metals and green hydrogen in this country. That is about reshaping our industrial base.

That's not it. The next piece is to repair nature. This is why, while this country is in the grip of a nature crisis, it is imperative that this chamber passes our nature-positive environmental reform laws. Otherwise, we do not get to actually fix this emergency properly.