Page 298 - Week 01 - Thursday, 11 December 2008
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the Change” is a very catchy name—and I congratulate the person who came up with the title—but the content is sorely lacking.
As with many things that we see from the Stanhope government, their commitment is questionable. Only yesterday in question time we had the first drawback from the world leading feed-in tariff. I had the privilege two weeks ago to spend three days at the Australian-New Zealand Solar Energy Society’s 43rd annual conference. The abiding issue throughout all of the high-level and low-level and more technical debates and discussions throughout three days and three or four parallel sessions most of those days was the importance of a feed-in tariff, the general failure of Australian governments and legislatures to adopt a feed-in tariff and the great steps that have been made by the ACT to adopt a gross feed-in tariff at a moderately high level and an open-ended feed-in tariff.
And what did we hear yesterday? We heard the Minster for the Environment, Climate Change and Water say that we had to come back into this place to amend the legislation. We have all known since the day it was passed that there were flaws in the legislation and that it needed to be amended. But they were little technical flaws about whether we should be counting things in kilowatts or kilowatt hours. What was foreshadowed yesterday by the minister was a radical change to a piece of legislation that has not even started to operate. There was a great deal of emphasis, in what the minister said yesterday, on householders and medium sized building owners.
What the Liberal Party said in relation to the feed-in tariff was, “Whilst that is important, the big impact you’re going to get is if you have the capacity for large-scale generation.” The concern that I, as the shadow minister, had was that there were limitations that would prohibit or constrain large-scale generation in the feed-in tariff scheme. Yesterday the minister said, “The new regime requires a range of amendments before it can be made operational. I can inform the Assembly that the government intends to introduce an amendment bill early next year”—yes, we knew that was coming—“for a range of matters”—get this, Madam Deputy Speaker—“including capping the scheme, clarifying generators’ eligibility and reimbursement arrangements.”
One of the takeout messages from the 43rd annual conference of the Australia-New Zealand Solar Energy Society was that capped schemes will fail. They looked at countries that had been innovative—Spain, Germany et cetera—and the criticisms of many of those places, including Italy, was that they had capped schemes that actually limited. Spain had been successful for many years, but it was reaching its cap and there was less scope for innovation because people were reaching the cap. Because there were capped schemes people introduced small-scale arrays, small-scale plants, rather than larger scale plants. One of the takeout messages was that capped schemes will fail us in the future and the message that came from policy makers, whether they be environmental scientists, engineers or economists was that we must eschew a capped scheme in Australia.
The message from that conference the other day was that Australians should be emulating what is happening in the ACT. I am putting on record the Liberal opposition’s concern that even before this scheme sees the light of day the Stanhope government wants to wind it back. The Stanhope government has indicated that it
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