Page 1127 - Week 03 - Thursday, 26 February 2009
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work could not be done in time we would have something start, rather than having a vacuum. That is what it is all about. It is about preventing prevarication.
We have just heard the minister say, “Well, you know, there’s a bunch of things that are still in play. There’s the thing. There’s the bodgie CPRS my mates up on the hill are trying to introduce.” If we are going to sit here taking into account every other thing that is still in play, it will be well past Christmas and they will still be saying: “There are things in play. Gee, we have to keep a few other things in mind before we can get a feed-in tariff to get medium and large-scale things in this town.” That is why the Greens have put in the amendments we have, because the pressure needs to be maintained.
I am not going to go into the history of this bill, but there are rumours that circulate about how much difficulty Mr Gentleman had to get his own colleagues in the Labor Party to agree to this piece of legislation. They are only rumours—I could not possibly cite them in here—but I think there are plenty of people other than me that have heard these rumours, and that suggests there is some truth to them.
I make all these comments simply in order to respond to the unfortunate direction the debate has taken, but I look forward to settling back down, dropping my heart rate and going back to a considered look at the amendments on the table.
MRS DUNNE (Ginninderra) (4.50): These are important matters and these are matters that the Liberal opposition looked at very closely and considered at some length. We made it perfectly clear that the measures proposed by Mr Rattenbury, which included the 75 per cent, were unacceptable to us. At roughly the same time as Mr Rattenbury went out and commissioned amendments that he is moving here today, we commissioned amendments which sought to extend the cap beyond the 30 megawatts and to put pressure on the minister to come up with an appropriate proportion of the premium rate at which large installations should be dealt with.
I need to touch on a few things because all of the groups in this Assembly have had conversations with people in the solar industry who are interested in setting up in the ACT. We are all talking to the same people and we all know what these industries want. We have had a briefing from the department and we have heard in here from the minister, and the implication is that the solar industry are a whole lot of greedy people who want to come to the ACT and exploit the ACT taxpayers at their benefit.
I think in the briefing the words “windfall profits” were used, and the minister here said if all these things came about and we paid people at 75 per cent of the premium rate they would make an enormous amount of money and that would adversely affect the ACT tax basis. The minister knows, as I know, Mr Seselja knows and Mr Rattenbury knows, that the large-scale solar industries do not expect that the proportion of the premium rate that is paid to them as large-scale producers is anything like 75 per cent, and it is disingenuous, not altogether honest, and not a good way to start relationships with these organisations, for the minister to imply that. They have made it perfectly clear.
As I said, the Canberra Liberals contemplated amendments which were similar to this but did not include the 75 per cent premium rate. We were not prepared to go there
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