Mark Coulton (Parkes, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

What we are seeing here today is a Labor Party that is completely removed from everyday Australians. In an attempt to pander to the urban elite, they are completely trashing the opportunities for working Australians. They have a leader who is a champion for working Australians—as long as the TV camera is on him and he is looking down a coal mine or something like that, he is a champion—but when he is sitting in the party room and they need to make some decisions to stand up for working Australians they fold and go to the urban Green preferences. That is what this is about. There is no recognition of the facts that are going on here.

I have heard the member for Hunter has been mentioned today. I will tell you something about the member for Hunter. In his electorate there is a town called Kandos. In the same week that the Labor Party, then in government, introduced the carbon tax the Kandos cement plant closed. Over 100 years, multigenerations of good, hardworking Australians worked in that plant. It closed down and now cement for central New South Wales comes through the heads of Sydney Harbour from a country that does not have any emissions control and the people of western New South Wales miss out.

We see absolute dishonesty here today and a lack of recognition of what is actually happening. The shadow minister, the member for Port Adelaide, was involved in the agreement on the RET, which was made in June, which secured the future of energy over the next number of years and it secured doubling our rate of renewable energy. So the number of wind farms that we have seen in the last 15 years needs to be replicated in the next six. It will be a difficult task. It is possible, but that is about the capacity we have to do this. The idea that there is actually nothing happening in this space is an absolute distortion of the facts. In fact, in my electorate I now have three solar farms, one of them being the largest in the Southern Hemisphere and one at Moree, which was actually funded by this government. That now provides energy in a practical sense in places where the grid needs that extra boost. In fact, residents in places like Dubbo, in my electorate, have the largest take-up of small-scale solar on their roofs than anywhere else in Australia. But a 50 per cent increase in renewables that we are seeing from the opposition is just nonsense.

I ask the shadow minister: are we still going to have compensation for our high energy emitters—aluminium and the other industries? Because, if we are, that pretty well means 100 per cent renewables for the rest of us. I want to know how he will explain to the battlers and the pensioners of Australia, as they shiver under their doonas in the winter and as they swelter without their air-conditioners in the summer, how this fanciful target of 50 per cent will be of any benefit to them. We need to have a sensible discussion on this matter, based on the actual facts. We need to get away from this university-high school type debate we are now having where it is all about who has the highest target wins, despite the fact that there is absolutely no practical way of that happening. Why do we not have a sensible discussion of what is possible, what it means and what it will cost the Australian people?

In the Parkes electorate the Labor Party is absolutely on the nose—you might be doing well in Vaucluse and in Melbourne, in the most concreted parts of Australia—out there where people actually work for a bob, where they understand that they need energy to survive and that in summer it is nice if their mother and father can afford to turn on the air-conditioner, they understand what is going on here. This is a ploy by the Labor Party to pander to the wealthy, urban elite, to make them feel like they are doing something to protect the environment, when they are actually living in the most altered part of the country. (Time expired)

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