Page 3024 - Week 07 - Thursday, 30 June 2011
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I don’t see there’s a lot of public benefit of residential PV programs. I’m not saying that no funds should go to solar PV research. I think that’s incredibly important and I’d like to see a lot more money devoted to solar PV research.
I just think the residential PV sector is not where we should be concentrating our efforts.
But we have. The government has. That is the policy dilemma we are faced with. That is the inevitable consequence of bad policy. Industries that rely on a heavily subsidised scheme do so at their detriment in the end. They can get benefits for a short period of time, as we have seen with other schemes; then, when they come to a sudden, screeching halt because they are unsustainable, we know that business suffers and we know that consumers suffer.
We recall the national green generators forum examination of the New South Wales scheme before it was scaled back, which found that the cost of creating jobs under the scheme was in order of $130,000 to $700,000 per year for each new job, which in our approximation is an extremely ineffective way to cut emissions.
That is where we find ourselves. Today’s debate is about how we can make that better, how we can try and improve what is a very bad scheme. It is about providing some cushion for local businesses. But importantly, from our perspective, there are some principles that we believe have to be honoured. This has formed the basis of our negotiations with the Greens and with the government on this. They are these.
We believe that any changes to the scheme should see electricity users paying less. That is what our amendments will seek to do—see electricity users paying less. Any changes to the scheme should ensure that good faith contracts are honoured—and our amendments, importantly, will do that.
We believe that anyone who signed up in good faith to a government scheme, whether we agree with that government scheme or not—if they signed up in good faith, those contracts should be honoured. That is critically important. We should not be retrospectively taking away people’s rights.
Thirdly, we believe that, going forward, there is a need to soften the blow for industry in a transitional sense. The industry should be on notice that this scheme will be coming to an end in a few months time, maybe longer. The reality is that the way it has been handled to date, where industry was told that they could expect it to go for another 12 or 18 months, and it came to a screeching halt in the dead of night, is bad policy and a bad way to handle things.
Businesses do need some cushion to scale up and plan for the future. At present, there are approximately 18 solar companies in the ACT looking to scale down. This is going to affect an industry of approximately 400 skilled workers. When concerns were raised by industry, this is the assurance they got from government, from the minister. He said:
Uptake in each category is tracked closely by the Government on a quarterly basis. Once the caps are about two-thirds taken up, this monitoring (and the
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