Page 740 - Week 02 - Thursday, 12 February 2009
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best be described as grandstanding around this whole package at a time when the Senate is seriously debating the relative merits of the package. It is important that the Senate scrutinises this package. Certainly, my federal colleagues have expressed frustration at how late the information on the package came through, considering how much it has been worked through by Treasury, and how late it was given to the House of Representatives. There are also problems around the inability of community organisations and industry organisations to contribute by commenting on the package. I made some comments earlier this week in the chamber about the idea of consultation not being a case of putting the thing out there and saying, “Now we are going to consult.” You actually go and talk in the first place.
Let me speak specifically to the actual stimulus package itself. We are in a serious economic situation in Australia and the need for a stimulus package is widely recognised. It is also widely recognised that job creation and job preservation is a top challenge for the government in these times. The package is significant and will create substantial government debt which will be a burden on taxpayers for some considerable period of time. That is something that we should take very seriously. In that context, it is vitally important that this money, the money that future generations are going to have to continue to pay back, is used as a point of investment for those future generations. We need to have an eye to the immediate problem but also to the future implications of this package and the future benefits that it can deliver.
When I looked at the package my initial reaction to the proposal for free ceiling insulation and the extended solar hot-water rebate was one of “hallelujah”—that finally the federal government had listened to the things that the Greens had been talking about for a number of years. It had finally realised that it makes sense to invest in energy efficiency measures and that putting money into that not only reduces our greenhouse emissions but also saves money down the line; it is an investment in our future. The real question is why this work has not been done over the last decade, either by the federal Liberal government or by the federal Labor government. Both governments have been told—they have been told by the Greens, they have been told by community organisations, they have been told by the industry—but neither major party at the federal level has had the foresight to stand up and invest in Australia’s future. In the good times when there was plenty of money around to do these sorts of things they should have started to cut Australia’s emissions.
Both the Labor Party and the Liberal Party are responsible for the fact that Australia has, out of Kyoto, a target that will see Australia’s emissions increase. Governments of both persuasions could have done a great deal over the last decade to ensure that we came in below that Kyoto target, that we showed leadership on a global level and actually did something worthwhile. When I heard about the ceiling insulation proposal, aside from my initial reaction of, “Finally, we’ve got there,” I was thinking, “That is a good initiative but surely we can be a little more flexible, a little more innovative and a bit more creative.” Plenty of people who have already got ceiling insulation should still be able to increase the energy efficiency of their homes. Therefore, that part of the package should be more flexible. We could say: “Here is some money. You go and choose the best energy insulation measure you can think of for your house.” I fear there will be a bottleneck in the ceiling insulation industry and there will be all these other people sitting around with great insulation technologies, or energy efficiency technologies, twiddling their thumbs because everyone is
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