Page 675 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 24 February 2010
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the assessment tool roughly every fortnight. So you can feed the same home into the calculator each fortnight and get a different assessment out each time.
Of course, once you have got your assessment done you would be very lucky if your assessor could actually get through to the government hotline to register the assessment, and some assessors have been left high and dry with payments not coming through in a timely way. The best thing that householders are getting is a couple of useful hours spent with them, talking about what they can do and getting an understanding of good building design and other issues.
The collateral damage is the companies that have been built on the back of this program and that are now restricted in their work—companies that have employed hundreds of people and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on training and the establishment of call centres and other infrastructure for their businesses.
The next case study is the solar PV rebate and the impact on the renewable energy target. This is another systemic failure by a government that got elected on a clean green progressive climate platform but has sadly failed to deliver it. The federal government capped the PV rebate because it was too popular; God forbid that a program should actually work! The rebate was means tested and then suddenly the rebate was stopped and people justifiably asked questions. Then the PV rebate was rolled into the renewable energy target and, with the multiplier effect, started sucking up renewable energy certificates and left solar hot-water installers and efficiency industries wondering why they had been left out in the cold. This rocky history of the domestic PV program is almost comparable to that of the Howard government’s, the end of which was threatened after two years.
While it may be good that the solar credits scheme for domestic PV, along with the ACT’s feed-in tariff law, has maintained a demand for solar PV systems, the RECs do not represent real renewable energy generation, and now, because lots of RECs have been created by heavily subsidised hot-water systems, supply of RECs is exceeding demand, the price is dropping and we are seeing investment in wind energy drying up. Billions of dollars of investment in wind energy projects are sitting on the sidelines because of what is effectively another systemic failure of policy by the federal government.
The government were warned about this; this might sound familiar. Industry analysts did give advice. But, rather than take a holistic approach to green energy and the development of the green economy, the federal government have waxed and waned, and those fledgling industries that are committed to the development of the green economy in this country and that should be encouraged have had nothing but ups and downs and starts and stops.
Last but not least is the renewable remote power generation program, which Mrs Dunne referred to, which provided renewable energy to remote parts of Australia, including many Indigenous communities. Probably one of the better programs instigated by the Howard government, it was canned by the Rudd government with no real explanation. And now, because the solar PV incentives really only provide assistance for systems of less than 1.5 kilowatts, those remote communities, who generally have much larger systems, are missing out.
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