They're saying, 'Let's take public funds and give them to the gas corporations that pay
no tax at the moment and make massive super profits.'
This is a subsidy for big corporations that pay no tax and pollute and kill our planet.
Why are they getting this money?
It's because they make donations.
They make donations to the Liberal Party, the Labor Party and the National Party—millions
of dollars of donations—and they get their way.
What's even more astonishing is that the Clean Energy Finance Corporation is making a profit
at the moment.
It is investing in clean energy technologies, and that's the future.
And it is making a return to government.
This government wants to turn a profit-making Clean Energy Finance Corporation into a venture
that invests in losing money on gas.
The government knows that public subsidies for gas are the only way gas is going to be
profitable, so it is turning a profit-making corporation into something that is going to
start losing money on its gas investments—because it wants to bankroll them, and it wants to
bankroll gas investments.
The government knows that no-one in their right mind is looking at investing in new
fossil fuel investments, so they come to the government with their hand out and this government
of largesse and donations and subsidies for big corporations is giving money to them.
It is not asking these big corporations to pay more tax.
Instead, it is giving them massive public subsidies.
And from this government that says, 'Technology, not taxes; we've got to let the market decide,'
is about to open up the $10 billion that exists in the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and
make it available to big gas corporations.
We know that gas is as dirty as coal.
We know that methane, which leaks and is released into the atmosphere when you start fracking
under good farmland and land across Australia, is up to 86 times more potent than CO2 as
a greenhouse gas.
We know that, if we unleash the gas in the Beetaloo Basin or in other places around Australia,
we can say goodbye to making our contribution to giving our kids a safe climate to live
in.
We know that the technology is there now, with renewables and storage, to drive a clean
energy revolution.
But what does this bill do?
This bill comes in and says, 'Let's make public money available for gas corporations.'
I notice the members on the other side have gone very quiet about this.
For all their free market rhetoric, they cannot wait to shovel billions of dollars out the
door to give to their mates in the gas corporations—the same corporations who turn around and donate
to them.
The biggest gas corporations in this country over the last few years brought in about $50
billion in revenue and paid zero tax.
They did make some donations.
They made donations to the government and they made some donations to the Labor Party,
but they paid zero tax.
You would think the starting point with big corporations that are contributing to wrecking
our planet should be, 'Pay some tax on the massive superprofits you are making and contribute
a bit to the cost of dealing with the climate crisis.'
But, no, this supposed free market government, that says it loves technology and won't want
to interfere in the unleashing of technology, is about to take the Clean Energy Finance
Corporation and the $10 billion that is there to drive the uptake of clean technologies
in Australia and make it available to dirty, polluting gas and toxic methane.
How is it going to do that?
This bill changes the definition of what counts, effectively, as clean energy and what counts
as low-emissions technology and expands it to explicitly include gas.
I'm waiting for the spirited defence from the member for Goldstein about why there are
massive subsidies going to big corporations in his supposedly free market.
I'm not hearing very much.
All the free market 'technology, not taxes' rhetoric dissolves into dust when it comes
to subsidising their big corporate mates.
Big corporations have too much power over politicians.
They exercise that power through political donations and, in return, they get things
like this bill—a massive multibillion-dollar slush fund for big gas.
And yet people wonder why the cost of going to the doctor keeps going up or why, when
you send your kid to a public school, you get hit with all these voluntary school fees,
and what is meant to be a free education turns out to be far from it.
Why is everyone else having to pay more?
Because these big corporations get away with paying no tax.
And, instead of rectifying it, the government is about to give them even more public money.
This Clean Energy Finance Corporation was set up by the Greens and Labor in the power-sharing
parliament of 2010.
This government has tried to destroy it.
This government tried to wipe out all of that legacy.
The only time pollution in this country meaningfully came down was when the Greens, Labor and Independents
worked together and put a price on pollution and put in place the Clean Energy Finance
Corporation, put in place the Australian Renewable Energy Agency and put in place things like
the Carbon Farming Initiative.
It has worked.
The government tried to get rid of the CEFC.
The government does not want this body to exist.
The government does not want there to be a profitable government owned organisation that
helps clean technologies expand.
This is what the Clean Energy Finance Corporation does.
It was established to say, 'When these new technologies that are invented pass the proof-of-concept
space and turn out to be viable propositions, we will use public funds to help them grow
and become self-sustaining businesses.'
And it has worked.
The CEFC has invested $8.2 billion of public money to generate $29 billion of new economic
activity to support jobs and infrastructure and to bring new clean energy technologies
online.
The technology that the Prime Minister loves talking about doesn't come out of nowhere.
It comes out of organisations like the CEFC supporting researchers and businesses to take
their ideas and turn them into viable commercial enterprises.
That is what the CEFC is there for.
Because renewables are the future and the fuel is free, the CEFC by investing the money
has made $1.7 billion in profit from carefully chosen investments, money that actually goes
straight back to the government's bottom line.
So the CEFC is using public funds to take really good ideas in the renewables and clean
energy space and help grow them into viable and thriving businesses.
It makes money for the government, because when the businesses make money they pay some
back.
It is a terrific idea, and that is why the Greens, Labor and the Independents established
it.
The government wants to repeal it.
It has tried time and time again to repeal it.
Because it has been unsuccessful in repealing it, it is now coming back with a different
approach.
The different approach is to say: 'We know that the public likes renewables and we know
that this thing set up by the Greens, Labor and the Independents has been a roaring success
and the public wants it.
We can't repeal it anymore, so what are we going to do?
We are going to change it.
We are going to make the money available to the gas corporations.
So we are going to move to amend this bill so that the minister does not have the power
to tell the independent Clean Energy Finance Corporation how to spend its money and so
that the minister cannot come along and say, 'I am going to define gas and maybe even coal
as a low-emissions technology.'
We are going to stop the minister from being able to do that.
And we are going to say to the minister that, if he really wants to take public money and
put it into a new coal- or gas-fired power station, as he is regularly on the front page
of various papers saying he wants to do, he should come back with a separate piece of
legislation.
The Clean Energy Finance Corporation is the 'Clean' Energy Finance Corporation.
Don't try and use it as another slush fund for corporate mates to funnel money back to
gas corporations.
That is what he is proposing to do.
The Prime Minister is telling Joe Biden we've got all these wonderful things.
He doesn't tell him that we tried to repeal them.
What he doesn't say is that the only thing this government, in all the time since it's
been elected, has that wasn't a Greens or Labor idea is its Emissions Reduction Fund,
which has saved barely 200 million tonnes of abatement over its lifetime.
The CEFC alone, last year, brought in 250 million tonnes.
And the government's Emissions Reduction Fund involves the public paying the polluters whereas
things like the CEFC make money by growing new technology and new businesses.
Why on earth would you want to tinker with that and take money away from renewables and
make it available to the gas and coal and dirty fuel corporations?
There can only be two answers.
One is that you don't seriously believe in climate change—and we heard from the Deputy
Prime Minister that he doesn't care what happens in 30 years time.
He doesn't care if we go over that cliff and our kids are left to pick up the mess.
So we understand why the government is moving this bill.
It is because they don't care what's going to happen in 30 years time.
The only other reason you'd do it is that your big corporate donors have asked you to.
Those big corporate donors, that pay zero dollars in tax, aren't being asked by this
government to pay their fair share.
Instead, they're being given more handouts.
It's time to say enough of the handouts for the big corporations.
The big corporations and the billionaires need to pay their fair share of tax.
They need to pay a bit more so that everyone else can pay a bit less.
That's going to start by amending this bill.