Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

That is right. But these government handouts have to be paid by someone. That is something the Labor party does not understand. They are paid by families through higher electricity prices. They are paid by families, by factories, by hospitals, by schools, by offices, by churches and by retail shops. They are the people that pay the price of these policies.

So what this motion actually seeks to do is to promote the interest of wind farm developers—either the union-controlled Pacific Hydro or foreign multinationals—at the expense of Australian families and businesses. The evidence from overseas is clear. While the member for La Trobe may talk about the wonderful jobs that they create, we also have to look at the jobs they destroy. The evidence, as I said, from overseas is clear: policies to subsidise wind and solar power have proven an absolute disaster in Germany, Denmark and Spain, where it has been calculated that, for every 'green' job that is created, in the real economy it has destroyed 2.2 jobs. A recent Verso study in the UK has found these types of subsidies destroy 3.7 jobs for every green job created. It is clear—for every wind turbine constructed in our country, jobs are lost, our nation's prosperity is reduced, we become less competitive and costs of living become higher. As Henry Ergas pointed out today:

NEXT year, each man, woman and child in this country will pay $450 in electricity charges for "green schemes"…

That totals, across the economy, $10 billion. For a mother raising three young kids, that is $1,800 it will cost them in the next year alone in electricity prices.

We need to consider the opportunity costs of subsidising hopelessly inefficient wind turbines. We live in a world where billions go to bed hungry at night. We live in a world where millions will die this year from particulate and water pollution. We in this parliament have to try and find $8 billion a year to fund our National Disability Insurance Scheme. No-one will ever know what new products, what new processes or what medical breakthroughs will have failed to come into existence, killed before they were born, because of the diversion of our nation's precious, valuable resources into wind turbines. No-one will ever be able to compute the price that we all will pay for this public policy failure, keeping our standard of living lower than it would otherwise have been.

And for what? What is this for; what is the entire point? Well, members on the other side often regurgitate that delusional phrase: 'We are taking action on climate change.' Firstly, we need to be clear how little power wind turbines actually produce. You would need 3,500 giant steel windmills to produce the equivalent output of one single, medium-sized conventional coal or gas fired power station. Secondly, even if we built these 3,500 steel windmills, we would still need a gas fired power station as a backup—for when the wind doesn't blow, the power doesn't flow. It is that simple. And of course any gas fired backup power station needs to be ramped up and down to compensate for the intermittency of the wind. A gas fired plant runs inefficiently, burning more gas and having a shorter life span than a plant which is just working normally. It is like a car battling through heavy traffic—less fuel efficiency and more wear and tear. Overseas studies have suggested that we could actually lower our emissions of carbon dioxide if we did away with wind turbines altogether and just ran gas power stations inefficiently.

We have beautiful country landscapes around our nation, from Beaudesert to Boorowa, magnificent horse-riding trails and picturesque vistas. We can desecrate these landscapes by covering them with giant steel industrial wind turbines for as far as the eye can see, but it is not going to do anything to change the temperature of the globe and it not going to have any measurable effect on levels of carbon dioxide. To do so would be a recipe for retarding economic growth, increasing poverty and harming human health. That is what this motion seeks to do. By any analysis, this motion is to support a public policy disaster. (Time expired)

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