BOB Katter has gone into bat for the clean energy sector after Prime Minister Tony Abbott announced a change to the mandate of the Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC) to not fund wind farms or small scale solar projects and stating it was government policy to abolish the CEFC.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
The CEFC acts as a public bank and lends on a commercial basis and has $10 billion to invest in renewable energy projects and has already deployed $1 billion.
CEFC has a pipeline of investment for renewable projects in the Kennedy electorate conservatively estimated at half a billion dollars.
The CEFC lending on a commercial viability basis makes money.
Clean Energy Finance Corporation chief executive Oliver Yates recently visited Mount Isa and said the city would be an ideal location to test the effects of solar energy in a community.
Parliament announced earlier this month it has slashed the renewable energy target (RET) and the government ordered the nation’s green bank to stop investing in wind and rooftop solar.
The government says the $10 billion body was always intended to fund emerging technologies, not well-developed clean energies like wind farms.
But Labor believes the government is setting up the corporation for collapse, after twice failing to abolish it in the parliament.
Mr Katter said the CEFC is the only bank owned by the people that operates in Australia and it is the” only government instrumentality that operates at a genuine profit”.
“It is the most extraordinary situation in Australia where the mainstream banks enjoy a government guarantee – the only commercial operations to do so.
Quite frankly their conduct in agriculture – it would be kind to say – is driven by an irresponsible, profligate, unrestrained and immoral rapacity,” Mr Katter said.
The Prime Minister is reported as saying that it is government policy to abolish the CEFC given that if a project stacks up commercially it will attract funding. Mr Katter has challenged this, citing two industries in Queensland that would not exist without government backing.
“Government finance has always been utilised to ignite development.
“There would not be any coal industry in Queensland if we applied that principal; and there would be no aluminum processing industry if we applied that principal,” Mr Katter said.
Mr Katter believes that in the right location wind farms can successfully generate additional incomes for small communities and landholders.
