Pat Conroy (Shortland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Mr Deputy Speaker, do you know that 60 per cent of the world's solar PV cells are based on technology developed at the University of New South Wales, in the member for Kingsford Smith's fine electorate? Yet, because of the obstinacy and the stone-age thinking of the Howard government, we got very few jobs out of it, despite our world-leading expertise. Sadly, it is being repeated now by the Turnbull-Joyce government. The government's absolutely stone-age thinking on renewable energy is leading us down the same path. As the shadow minister talked about before, we have fallen from fourth to 39th in investment in clean energy. We have been overtaken by paragons of clean energy investment like Myanmar. For example, our clean energy investment is one-fifth that of Mexico, who are ninth on the league table. The great pity of this is we will miss out on jobs, we will miss out on a future for our kids, and we will see a much higher cost of transitioning our economy.

We have 27 gigawatts of coal-fired generation in this country, and the fleet is getting very old. In Victoria the average age of that coal-fired generation is 40 years. In New South Wales it is 34. We desperately need to see retirement of some of that capacity. But, because of the stone-age thinking of the government, it will not be replaced by clean energy that has been developed here, will provide jobs here and will allow us to transition our economy. What will happen is we will see delays, we will see a higher cost to the government, and our kids and our grandkids will bear that cost. If you have look at every single industrial revolution in our globe's history, the truth is it was the countries that developed the technology that took the greatest advantage of it, whether it was steam power and textiles in Britain, whether it was chemicals and steel in Germany and the United States or whether it was electronics in Japan and the United States. It is the countries that develop the technologies that are best placed to take advantage of those industrial revolutions, but because of the Luddites opposite, led by the Prime Minister, we will not take advantage of it.

The great tragedy is that it could be very different. Only as late as 2011, now Prime Minister Turnbull professed a need for us to decarbonise the energy sector to make it a net zero emitter by 2050. He has completely abandoned it in a dirty deal with the hard right of the Liberal Party, with the Luddites of the National Party, with the Joyce-Christensen government that keeps him in power. He stays in power by selling out every single principle. And it is not just the Liberal Party that will suffer—it will be our kids and our grandkids—as we fail this nation. This needs a serious debate. We are taking it up, and all we are getting is denial from the member for Hughes and the Prime Minister.

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