Senator RYAN (Victoria—Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Education) (16:03): I rise to speak on this motion moved by Senator Siewert.
I would like to address a couple of the things raised by Senator Di Natale in the course of my contribution.
I note the motion today refers to the alleged lack of strong environmental policies to address climate change or safeguard natural resources in Victoria. I find myself in a bit of a quandary because over the last 30 years, no-one has done more to undermine the role of states in environmental management supervision and authority than the Greens, usually accompanied by the Labor Party.
They will bring local issues into this chamber because they constantly claim that they are issues of national significance. But what this motion betrays, through its timing and through the hypocrisy posed by the Green’s history, talking about state environmental management in this place, is that this is nothing less than an election stunt.
What I also found myself in a quandary about is that it refers to natural resources yet through my 6½ short years in this place and my time involved in state politics prior to that I saw no-one as hostile to the use of our natural resources as the Greens, whether that be our mineral resources such as coal, whether that be actually using the natural resources in farmland and exporting food and fibre or whether it be exporting protein to the world through programs like live exports—I am sure Senator McKenzie will talk about those some more—or whether, in particular, it be the Green’s campaign to lock up one of our great renewable resources, forests.
The Greens have been hostile to the use of Victoria’s natural resources and, indeed, hostile to their protection through their mismanagement of the national estate. Anyone on the border of a national park or a state reserve in a stroke in Victoria will tell you that the worst landlord is the government.
Because the Greens, through a campaign of misleading people from schools right through the community, have done everything they can to create this false notion that we should not be trying to manage this natural resource. Tragically, we see that when we have the risk of fire as we do so often in south-eastern Australia.
I look forward to a Greens speaker commending the Victorian state government for increasing the burn-off ratios over the last four years to reduce the risk for so many people that live on the border or amongst our national forests and our state forests in Victoria.
As is usual for the Greens, this motion is phrased in a way that does not understand the limits of our own actions.
When it comes to the first issue they raise, that of climate change, Victoria can no more dramatically impact the level of global emissions than can Australia. Yet what this motion does is it demands of Victorians to pay higher cost than the rest of the nation. What the states and the Commonwealth—and I might say with the agreement of the other state governments, including a signature of the then Greens environment minister from Tasmania—have agreed is that the states are responsible for adoption.
But no, in an effort to increase the number of bumper stickers on bicycle helmets in Fitzroy, to turn this into a state political issue, the Greens somehow think that Victoria can lead the world. The Greens come in here knowing that what they are saying is false, knowing that what they are saying will impose a greater burden on Victorian business and Victorian households and demand that Victorians pay higher costs than not only everybody else in the world but everybody else in Australia too.
Come Saturday at our state election, the Greens will see the results, as they saw at the last federal election, where people have started to realise the shallowness of their claims, the hypocrisy of their stance and the constant hyperbole: the Chicken Little, the Senator Henny Pennys, who come in here and say: ‘The world is about to end.’
When people do not believe them or the tides do not rise quite high enough, they will double down and say: ‘The tides are going to rise higher’ or that ‘The cities are going to run out of water.’ When that does not come true, they will then try and obfuscate and turn the debate to new issues, as we heard Senator Di Natale do, on so-called renewable energy targets.
I make this point: Senator Di Natale proposed that someone who has a solar panel on their roof be paid the same rate as they might pay for electricity. The one piece of credit I will give the former Premier of Victoria, Mr John Brumby, I think he was Treasurer at the time, is that in the insanity of pursuit of Green preferences that occurred right around Australia at the state level when Labor was in office, where outrageous gross feed-in tariffs were granted to a limited number of people that could get solar panels on their roofs before everyone realised what a racket it was—there is research printed in today’s newspapers that point out that in South-east Queensland, they equate to a subsidy of $200 from every household that does not have them. This was to benefit a select few who got in before the gate was shut when the community demanded their power prices not be forced up so that the pensioner who could not afford solar panels was paying for the person driving the Land Cruiser next door, because they could afford the upfront cost. I do not know of any other part of this country where someone gets a legislated, regulated guaranteed market in the way that the Greens demand that every Australian subsidise their neighbours who can afford the upfront cost of solar panels.
When we go to the Greens war on coal and cheap energy, particularly in Victoria, there is an acute problem with this. Our brown coalfields that were first put to use by Sir John Monash after returning from World War I with some innovative acquiring of German technology at the request of the then Victorian Premier to develop the Latrobe Valley have been the basis of our middle-class growth for decades.
They were the basis—I am sure Senator Carr will agree—of manufacturing for many years—
Senator Kim CARR: On the basis of public ownership, if I remember rightly!
Senator RYAN: Senator Carr, I will take that interjection, because I recall the public ownership principle was first breached by Premier Joan Kirner when she sold off 49 per cent of Loy Yang B. The Kennett government might have sold the rest of it, but the sales first started under Premier Joan Kirner, Senator Carr—I note the smile—
The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT: Address your comments through the chair.
Senator RYAN: If brown coal is taken away from Victorians, their power prices will dramatically spike. There is no resource in Victoria that can supply baseload power at that price nor can we import the power that we need to keep Victoria going. To say that solar panels on roofs and windmills on our landscape can power the entire state of Victoria is profoundly and utterly misleading. But the Greens do this in order to try and drive their vote higher in the inner northern suburbs of Melbourne, between the CBD and the lycra belt.
These facts need to be known because the policies of the Greens hidden behind a veil of alleged respectability pose a real threat to most Victorians.
Over the last few months, we have seen the largest ever decrease in power prices in the records of the ABS in this country, because the carbon tax, which the Greens say was too small, was removed. Because brown coal has higher emissions than black coal, that had a greater impact in Victoria—just as the carbon tax had a greater risk for Victoria—because it is more emissions intensive. But, also, the war of the Greens on trying to prevent the expansion of the use of natural gas goes against their stated objective, because the single-greatest decrease in the emissions intensity over the last decade has been in the American economy due to the dramatic expansion of the use of natural gas.
Victoria potentially has very rich natural gasfields, yet because their favoured suppliers, donors and campaign workers all think we can run round with solar panels on our bike helmets, the Greens refuse to consider the expansion of responsible fossil fuels.
There is no alternative to the use of fossil fuels to provide the majority of power not only in Australia but around the world. The facts about increasing access to energy and making energy cheaper in the developing world are all about expanding the use, responsibly, of fossil fuels, and that will not change with the current technology mix.
This motion should be treated with the contempt that the empty slogans and the hypocritical statements of the Greens constantly illustrate to this chamber.
(Ends)