Mark Butler, TRANSCRIPT OF TELEVISION INTERVIEW SKY NEWS

Media Release

Mark Butler MP.

Shadow Minister for Environment 

Climate Change and Water

Date:  09 April 2014

HOST: Now, just before we start on the questions I really wanted to ask you, I note in South Australia, and in Adelaide in particular, there is concern. There’s been obviously a big announcement today, which I think will be putting dread into a lot of families in Adelaide and that’s of course this announcement about submarines, or about no submarines.

BUTLER: Well, that’s right. And we’re still really trying to get to the bottom of what it is the Government has announced today. It took some time for Tony Abbott and David Johnston to come to the party on the commitment that we’d made to build 12 new subs, the next generation of submarines that will service Australia for decades to come. Last year, in about May I think it was, both of them committed that they would also sign up to the 12 submarine commitment and they would be built here in Port Adelaide. David Johnston only repeated their commitment in February to deal with the two options that we’d narrowed it down to as a Government last year. Firstly, either an evolved version of the Collins class submarines or a brand new design, designed and built here in Port Adelaide. He only repeated that during the state election campaign when he was at Osborne at the submarine corp. So there was some confidence here in the South Australian community that ship building was here to stay for a very long time indeed. So today’s announcement was a bit of a body blow. It comes after a significant body blow with the loss of Holden’s and all of the car components companies that have serviced Holden’s for many decades as well.

HOST: Yes, you’ve obviously got your difficulties. But, I mean, were the Collins Class submarines all that good? I keep reading about how as soon they left the port in Adelaide, they could hear them in Beijing. I mean, they had troubles with noise, they had troubles with weaponry, I mean in the end did it all work out?

BUTLER: Well there were a couple of periods where they did have troubles and that got a lot of coverage in the media. Some pretty negative comments at the time from people seeking to make a political point. But I think if you talk to the experts, if you talk to the people overseas who we serve with and who we do operations with, the Collins Class sub is generally seen as one of the very, very best diesel subs in the world. See our operational needs, Graham, are quite unique here in Australia. We have a policy of not having nuclear submarines, so that carves out a significant amount of the market for us, but we also have very long distances to cover and very deep water surrounding Australia. So we looked for some to time to see if there was an off-the-shelf diesel submarine, so a non-nuclear submarine, that would serve our needs and there frankly isn’t. A European sub for example serves in very different waters for much shorter distances than we need here in Australia and that’s why we narrowed it down to an evolved Collins Class submarine, that I think even Tony Abbott called a ‘pretty good piece of kit’ last year. Either that, or a completely new design. So quite where David Johnston is going with this, given the amount of work that was done over the last few years by Navy and by a number of other institutions, has left us a bit shocked frankly here in South Australia.

HOST: Well, South Australia’s a bit shocked period. I mean, you’ve suffered some big blows in recent times and I wonder how you can overcome them. Now, look I can’t stay on that one. I had to ask because it’s a big announcement today. Can I just presume your main job, what you do from 9-5, oh well actually in your case probably a lot longer than that and that’s this whole question of renewable energy and the targets that are being set for reduction in greenhouse gases. Let’s look at the target. I think you’ve said the other day that you want to see them lifted, which I found quite extraordinary given what’s happening in the rest of the world.

BUTLER: Well, I found the coverage quite extraordinary because that is not what I said. What I said was that the government has before it a report from the Climate Change Authority. It has a statutory obligation, set out in law - that remains the law - for them to respond to that report I think by the end of May, so in the next seven or eight weeks. And that report recommends that we lift our pollution reduction targets to 15 per cent plus a 4 per cent carry over, so 19 per cent and the point I was making, was that only the week before last Greg Hunt recommitted the Coalition to the conditional target that we’d set in place – the 15 per cent - provided that certain conditions were met. And essentially, they were whether or not similar countries, so the sort of rich countries we tend to compare ourselves to – in Europe and North America and the like – were adopting similar targets and the Climate Change Authority said that they were. For example, America’s pollution reduction target is 17 per cent by 2020. So the point I was trying to make is that we’re not the Government. The Government has reconfirmed that conditional target as Coalition policy, only the week before last, the Government has a statutory obligation to respond to the Climate Change Authority report within seven weeks so I think it’s important that the community, the Parliament and the Opposition understand what process they’re following to formulate that response.

HOST: But is it worth having this argument? I mean, if you go back to last September I don’t think anybody can deny that if there was one thing that Tony Abbott campaigned on, in what was a pretty big triumph for him – he didn’t just scrape in, he got a big majority – it was the carbon tax. “The great big new tax” that he talked about day after day after day until most of us were sick of hearing it. But it worked. Don’t you have some sort of obligation to acknowledge what Australians said last September?

BUTLER: I think you and I have had this conversation a couple of times before Graham. We also went to the election with a very clear policy. Firstly to abolish the carbon tax, if we’d been elected this year it would be going, and to replace it with an emissions trading scheme which puts a legal cap on carbon pollution for the first time. This is the sort of scheme we’re seeing adopted in many of the countries that are now being visited by Tony Abbott. South Korea – our third largest export market – is bringing in place an emissions trading scheme next year and there are six or seven provinces already in in China, covering a population ultimately of a quarter of a billion people, putting these schemes in place; as it happens with Australian expertise helping them with universities and the like helping them because they saw what we did. So we went with a very clear platform. I, as the Member for Port Adelaide, did not get elected on Tony Abbott’s platform. I got elected on the Labor platform and that’s how we’ll be voting and that’s how we’ll be arguing the case in the Parliament. And you see next year, all of the countries that have interest in this matter – which is the vast bulk of countries – come together in Paris and seek to thrash out an agreement that will keep the increase in global temperatures to no more than two degrees. Everyone’s signed up to that – China, the US, most of Asia – certainly we have as well. And Tony Abbott’s said they’re committed to that as well. Only in the last couple of weeks you saw the US and China sign a memorandum of understanding reconfirming their commitment to use all their power, all their influence, to make that conference next year a meaningful conference. Tony Abbott has to work out –

HOST: I understand all that, but it seems to me with all these agreements that Australia is almost unique in abiding by them. Yes, quarter of a billion in some provinces in China have tried to sign up, but of course there’s five times that number in China and you’ve only got to get off the plane in Beijing, you can’t see literally two blocks any more. Pollution is dreadful and where is from? A whole lot of steel works pushing out the very gas that we’re talking about. The Chinese made an effort and that last a year for the Olympics and as soon as the Olympics were over that just dropped and now it’s right back to where it was, and worse. But it just seems to me we’re chasing our tail on this. But, anyway, I know you and I are never going to agree but the reason I raise it with you again is that on Saturday we had a result in Western Australia where Labor’s vote has sunk to 21 per cent and I just don’t think anyone who has got Labor values at heart can look at something like at ignore it. It’s a dreadful result and it’s not just because Joe Bullock’s an idiot. That may be worth 1 per cent but okay, had you got 22 I don’t think you’d be sitting there telling me it was wonderful. Ok, what’s gone wrong?

BUTLER: Well, I think we need to have a very close look at what went wrong over in Western Australia. I mean, it was the most unusual election I’ve certainly experienced – I haven’t been around as long as you have, but I’ve been around a while and having a statewide by-election was quite unique, quite unprecedented for us and in many senses what has happened is what traditionally happens in by-elections. You get a very big lift in the vote for minor parties; Palmer United and the Greens got a big lift and both of them ran very well-resourced campaigns, very well-resourced campaigns indeed. The Liberal Party got a very big swing against it, a bigger swing against it than the Labor Party it seems so far, but there’s no sugar coating the fact that the vote we received in the Labor Party was a very, very disturbing and poor result and I think that once we’ve got the votes in, in a calm and methodical way and a very forensic way, we’re going to have to have a close look at what happened in the WA campaign.

HOST: You see, I regard it as a dreadfully serious. Because you’ve got to add what happened in Queensland, what happened in New South Wales, what happened in Tasmania, in your state Labor scraped back with the vote of an independent with only 47 per cent of the two-party preferred vote. I mean Labor just seems to be in terrible shape and there doesn’t seem to be anybody doing anything about it. Life just seems to go on as if it’s all not happening and it just seems surreal to me.

BUTLER: Well, we’re still only six months from the election – six or seven months from the election – where we did suffer a pretty significant defeat. Not as significant as I think many commentators had predicted, but it was a very significant defeat and you’re right we’ve also suffered a range of defeats at state level that have terminated very, very long serving state Labor governments on the eastern seaboard and as you say in Tasmania. So part of this is cyclical because we’ve been in power in many states for a very long time indeed, but there’s no question I think Bill Shorten has admitted this, Tanya Plibersek, that after an election loss that we suffered in September it is very, very important that we look at every facet of how we operated over the last six years. Our policy propositions, our communications, our pre-selections and a range of other things as well and we’ll be doing that.

HOST: Alright, last question I have, and back to your portfolio. Last night on Richo and Jones we were talking on the program of the question of renewable energy and how expensive it is and how it’s multiple the cost of coal-fired power. Are we going to persist with spending millions of dollars on wind farms and all the rest of it when the cost of energy – and solar energy’s worse – just adds to the price of electricity massively?

BUTLER: Well they don’t. That’s just not the case.

HOST: [inaudible]

BUTLER: Well it’s not right. If you look at the regulatory agency reports –it differs from state to state depending on the energy mix – but if you look at any of them, it’s in the order of 3-4 per cent and coming down. So the large scale renewables program that you talk about – that Alan Jones talks about a lot, particularly wind – in NSW IPART the regulator there for electricity has said that it’s about 1.9 per cent per annum. So about 1.9 per cent of electricity bills and frankly that assumed a certificate price that retailers were able to claim of $51 and that’s far ahead of the market price at the moment. So I think there’s this myth emerging that renewables is somehow driving power prices up. Tony Abbott has said that on Alan Jones’s program a number of times. It’s simply not the case. Regulatory agencies have confirmed that the large scale is less than 2 per cent and the small scale is less than 2 per cent as well, which is essentially the rooftop solar programs, and that’s coming down. And that doesn’t account for the fact that where there is significant renewable capacity – for example in my state of South Australia – it’s having a suppression effect. It’s driving down wholesale power prices particularly in peak demand periods like we experienced in Victoria and South Australia in the heat waves. So, you shouldn’t believe this palaver about this being a big price driver. We have to move to cleaner energy in the future, it’s a significant investment opportunity, we’ve tripled the number of jobs in the sector in the six years that we were in government and I think it’s very concerning that investment is starting to turn down because of the mixed signals this government is sending the renewable energy sector, after committing in a bi-partisan way up to and including the election campaign that the existing renewable energy target would be respected by them.

HOST: Well I’ve got to say in the last 90 seconds, you’ve given a better explanation than anybody’s ever given in the last six months. I mean, why doesn’t Labor get out and sell this message? It just seems to me that all the best, if you take climate change itself, it doesn’t matter where you go climate change sceptics have the floor. Nobody seems to get up and argue the other way. Why? Why can’t we actually take on the argument?

BUTLER: I’ll come on this show as often as you want me to and talk about this. It was one of the great success stories of the last six years: moving to cleaner energy; it allows people who put solar panels on their rooftop to get out of skyrocketing power prices that we’ve seen across the country. Cleaner energy for them and lower power bills.

HOST: Except that we’re all subsiding them doing it. But anyway, I’ve got to leave it. We can’t have the argument all the time. But I’ll take you up on the offer of coming back because these issues are not going to go away and we need to keep talking about them.