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

The member for Port Adelaide also went on about Labor's wonderful efforts in solar. Well, the Grattan Institute recently put out comments on Labor's 'wonderful' effort, and I will quote directly from the Grattan Institute report. The Grattan Institute are hardly on our side of politics. They said:

… lavish government subsidies … means that the cost of solar PV take-up has outweighed the benefits by almost $10 billion. By the time the subsidies finally run out, households and businesses that have not installed solar PV will have spent more than $14 billion subsidising households that have. Australia could have reduced emissions for much less money. Governments have created a policy mess that should never be repeated.

The member for Port Adelaide comes in here and boasts about that—'a mess that should not be repeated'!

Looking at the cost of renewable energy, if the member for Wakefield is right and the costs are lower, that is absolutely fantastic because that means that we do not need the RET. We do not need any subsidies if the member for Wakefield is right.

The member for Port Adelaide, at his heart, is a central planner. He wants to control what form of energy should be generated in this country. We see the absolute unmitigated disaster that that has caused in his state. Only today, Manufacturing Australia has released a statement about how energy policy failures threaten manufacturing and threaten jobs:

Last month's power outage in South Australia was extremely damaging for manufacturing in that state.

It follows previous incidents in South Australia this year that have led to both supply outages and extremely high energy prices.

The lack of stability and high power prices in South Australia are threatening both existing and future manufacturing investment in a state already reeling from automotive closures.

We have a high standard of living in this country. We are able to afford hospitals, schools, roads, infrastructure and aged care. The expenditure that we are able to put out is the envy of many places in the world. The reason we can do that is that one of the great competitive advantages that our nation has is the low cost of energy. But the policies of the Labor Party threaten that very competitive advantage and they threaten the wellbeing and prosperity of our country. We must have a low-cost energy base if our country is to go forward. We need to look at all options for energy. Labor's 50 per cent renewable energy target would require close to 5,000 new wind turbines across the nation at a sum that Bloomberg calculates at over $40 billion. That is almost $2,000 for every Australian citizen. What would it achieve? It would simply achieve higher energy prices. We would see more Australians having their electricity disconnected and we would see more and more Australians jobs sent offshore as a result of this crazy and uncosted policy.

When we think about energy modernisation in the future, it is worthwhile looking at the figures from the International Energy Agency. They have done some calculations about where we stand in relation to the world supply of energy for solar and wind. Their 2015 report had solar's contribution to the total supply of global energy at not one per cent but 0.1 per cent—one-tenth of one per cent. And yet, if we invest billions and trillions of dollars worldwide and follow the plans of the Paris agreement, they estimate that by the year 2040 solar energy generation will be at 0.7 per cent of the world's energy supply. That is their estimate. Wind is currently 0.4 per cent of the world's energy supply. Less than one-half of one per cent of the energy generated in 2013 was generated by wind. If we go down the track of this renewable energy target and roll out tens of thousands of wind turbines around the country, where will that have us by the year 2040? The International Energy Authority give us the numbers. They estimate we will get to 1.7 per cent of the world's energy supply.

Whatever we do in this area, we must put energy security of the nation first, and we must make sure that we are providing all Australians with low-cost, affordable and abundant energy—that the lights are not going to turn out. We need to do it for households, and we also need to do it for industry. If we are going to have a prosperous future and if we are going to make any attempt at bringing our budget back to surplus and having the revenue base to pay for all the things that we do, we must maintain our competitive advantage in energy.

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