Kat THEOPHANOUS (Northcote): What an excellent motion we have before us today. Our Labor government is bringing back the SEC, and my goodness it is exciting: energy back in the hands of Victorians once again, 100 cent renewable energy, 59,000 renewable energy jobs, huge wind and solar projects and profits going back to the people, driving down emissions and protecting our climate. This is exciting stuff – not for the Liberal Party, though, of course. They are not very excited about this. The member for Croydon honestly seemed a little bit baffled about how we are doing this, which is unsurprising from those who could not figure out how to do a single thing when they had the chance. We expect nothing less from the party that would sell off the SEC in an instant if they had the chance, because that is exactly what happened in the 1990s, and three decades later this lot is still hungry to privatise everything they can get their hands on. What happened since our power assets were sold off to big private companies? Prices increased, workers were sacked and these big private companies made huge profits.
Well, our Labor government is turning this around. This year we will enshrine the State Electricity Commission into our constitution to protect it from those opposite. The SEC will massively accelerate our transition to renewable energy. In fact by 2035 an incredible 95 per cent of Victoria’s energy will come from renewables. Consider that in the context of where we came from. When Labor came into government in 2014 we inherited a state in which only 10 per cent of energy came from renewables. Let us not forget that the Baillieu government had dumped Victoria’s emissions reduction target in 2012 as they steadfastly refused to invest in renewable energy or prepare our state to transition out of fossil fuels. Not only that, their huge exclusion zones had ground private renewable energy investment to a halt, so we were basically starting from scratch.
In the space of less than a decade, we have more than tripled our renewable output to 36 per cent, far outstripping even our own targets. We are on track to reach 40 per cent by 2025 and 50 per cent by 2030. Then, in a little under two decades from when we came into government, we will reach 95 per cent renewables by 2035 – 95 per cent renewables. That is huge – it is huge. It makes us unequivocally the country’s leader in climate action, even a global leader. We now have the strongest climate change legislation in the country, and we are decarbonising at the fastest rate in the country. We have cut more emissions than any other state, and our emissions reduction targets of 80 per cent by 2035 and net zero by 2045 put us well and truly in line with the Paris goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees.
As you know, Northcote is where I was born and raised, and we are proudly diverse, progressive and climate conscious. We know that there are challenges ahead of us and that at the very base of those challenges is ensuring we have a safe climate for the future. This has always been a priority for me, and I have been proud to push this consistently and use my voice in the Parliament to push for ambitious climate policy and sustainability. Make no mistake, bringing back the SEC is exactly that, and it is exactly what Victorians voted for in 2022. Our community and our state chose a government that can deliver real action and real reform. We chose a government that will deliver for people now and for future generations. We chose security, equality and hope, and we rejected the scare campaigns and the slogans and the relentless pessimism.
The worst enemy of progress is cynicism, and though I have spoken about the damage wrought by the conservatives, there is yet another threat to the climate cause that lurks on the opposite end of the political spectrum, and that is the Greens political party. No-one will ever forget the federal Labor government’s original Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, which was defeated by a vote in the Senate by a coalition of conservative and Greens party senators – a vote that set our national climate change response back at least a decade and gave us Tony Abbott. This is not old news, it is the playbook of the Greens, and we almost saw it play out again federally when the Greens sought to sabotage Labor’s emissions reduction plan and safeguard mechanism. In the words of the Australian Workers Union national secretary Daniel Walton at the time:
Whenever the Greens have a choice between achieving a real, practical advance on climate change or destructive moralising you can always bet on the path they’ll choose.
Now we are seeing the exact same thing as they seek to block Labor’s $10 billion social housing fund – critical homes for some of the most vulnerable people in our community. It is very easy for minority parties to talk about climate action. Easier still is composing marketing campaigns which simultaneously criticise any steps we take forward while taking credit for them. Harder is doing the actual work that will deliver impactful policy and real change. So as much as I cringe when I see the conservatives push back on every single climate policy that we put forward, I am equally disgusted at the callous and self-serving theatrics of the Greens.
Reform does not happen by chance. It takes years of perseverance, engagement and policy refinement to get the balance right, fairly, inclusively, with the science and without leaving Victorians behind. That does not mean virtue-signalling rhetoric or disruptive vandalism. It does not mean grandstanding media ops or mass email campaigns calling for donations to your party or coming into this chamber to ask showboating questions or blocking progressive bills. Our community deserves more. Victorians deserve more.
Curbing the impacts of climate change is going to take every single one of us, yet right now the Greens are the single biggest threat to real climate action in this country, because their sole purpose is not progress but power. Make no mistake, they will undermine progressive Labor governments to get it. What they do not want us to know, their dirty little secret, is that every time we have a Labor government getting on with the job of our progressive reforms, they become more and more irrelevant. That is their dirty little secret and why time and again they will cynically feed right into the hands of conservatives. I cannot think of a more disingenuous, destructive, dangerous way of doing politics.
Energy and environment policy is a complex space, and it deserves more than simplistic solutions. My community know and understand that if we are going to move forward in climate action, we cannot afford to be dragged into more climate wars. We cannot afford the ideological wrecking ball that leads to progress halting. That just alienates communities and makes it harder to galvanise the support we need for real change. If we are truly going to harness consensus around climate action, we need to bring people with us, and that means people should never be made to feel guilty or, worse, morally inferior just for wanting a job or trying to make ends meet. Transition cannot only be for some and not for others. That is why at the heart of our transition is supporting workers, securing our energy supply, driving down bills and assisting Victorians with the cost of making homes energy-efficient. Our power saving bonus, Solar Homes program and Victorian energy upgrades program are all delivering real cost-of-living savings to Victorians right now at a scale not seen before. Public ownership of renewables through our SEC means we can keep the lights on, drive down bills, grow secure jobs, lower emissions and protect our climate.
The rate and scale of our transition in Victoria is enormous. We are effectively embarking on a wholesale transformation of our energy sector, a shift in our industries, our economies, our transport sector, our homes and our way of life. Take offshore wind as an example: our government’s offshore wind targets will deliver Australia’s first offshore wind farm and a massive 2 gigawatts of energy by 2032. That is equivalent to about 20 per cent of Victoria’s current energy needs, enough to power 1.5 million homes. By 2040 our offshore wind farms will exceed 9 gigawatts, well and truly setting us up to power our entire state with renewables. That project alone is a game changer, and it is not the only one. We have world-leading energy storage targets, the biggest battery in the Southern Hemisphere. We have a circular economy strategy that will divert 80 per cent of waste from landfill by 2030. Six new solar projects will help us power 100 per cent of government operations on renewable electricity. Neighbourhood batteries are going to forever shift the way we power and store energy and how it is distributed. There are urban farming and recycling projects. We are growing more tree canopy and protecting our waterways. As the member for Northcote I will always push for those transitions to happen more comprehensively, more equitably and more rapidly, but none of this progress happens by accident. It does not arise out of thin air or the urgency of a slick slogan. It happens under Labor governments acting to make changes to Victorian law and investing in the transition of our economy and our energy sector.
