Page 2213 - Week 07 - Thursday, 7 August 2014
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So-called direct action initiatives have been tried before and they have failed. A good example of this was the commonwealth’s greenhouse gas abatement program run by the Howard government. The commonwealth paid hundreds of millions of dollars to polluters through a tender process to reduce emissions; sound familiar? Despite this, what has been achieved? There is no evidence of any success of this initiative. Its failure has been scrubbed from the public record and I am sure that the current generation of commonwealth direct action policies will suffer a similar fate.
Of course, the commonwealth’s wrecking ball approach to climate policy does not stop with carbon pricing. The appointment of the well-known climate sceptic, Dick Warburton, to head the review of the commonwealth’s renewable energy target spells dark days ahead for this important piece of policy.
The ACT government has made a submission to the RET review highlighting that electricity is the main driver of Australia’s high level of greenhouse gas emissions. In the 12 months to 31 March 2013, the nation’s electricity supply emitted 187 megatons of CO2 equivalent, approximately a third of total national emissions. According to the World Resources Institute, Australia had the fourth highest per capita emission from electricity and heat supply in the world. This was the highest in the OECD and five times the world average.
This high level of emissions is driven by Australia’s dependence on black and brown coal for most of its electricity generation. It is inconceivable that meaningful emissions cuts can be achieved without properly tackling electricity supply sector emissions. In the presence of an effective national system for pricing carbon, the role for renewable energy targets would diminish over time. Wholesale market pricing would be corrected to internalise the social and economic costs of carbon pollution. Coupled with continuing reductions in the cost of renewable energy supply, carbon pricing would deliver the required decarbonisation of our electricity supply.
But in the absence of effective carbon pricing, the need for renewable energy support policies remains paramount. Given the dominant role of electricity in Australia’s high level of emissions, the government believes it is critical that the current renewable energy target is maintained and indeed strengthened over time. After a long history of growth, Australia’s electricity emissions actually declined over the last five years and this was in large part because of the renewable energy target. It is important that the momentum of this decline is sustained through the maintenance of the RET
Mr Assistant Speaker, we all understand the consequence of climate change. We all understand the increases in average global temperatures and what this means in terms of climate variability and impacts such as more extreme weather events. We will not be quarantined from these impacts. We need to move beyond this short-term partisan argument about costs and saving a few dollars on an electricity bill, towards a comprehensive policy setting that ensures we have a sustainable economy, community and environment for the long term.
MS LAWDER (Brindabella) (4.25): I am very happy to rise today to support Mr Hanson’s matter of public importance on the benefit to the ACT of the repeal of
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