Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

On Wednesday, 28 September, I was sitting in my house in the Barossa Valley and we prepared for the storm, because you saw on Facebook and on the news reports that there was this gigantic whether event heading towards South Australia. It was pretty clear that it was going to cause some disruption to community life. So, there I was and at around 5 o'clock the power went out so we lit the combustion heater and settled in for the night. We did not lose mobile coverage straight away, so there I was sitting on Facebook and I noticed that Senator Xenophon had basically given the government of South Australia about 45 minutes of blackout before he came out and blamed wind farms. There he was, running at record speed—he must sprinted to the Canberra studio from wherever he was in Canberra—straight into the arms of Chris Uhlmann to say that it was the fault of wind farms. He put the finger on the wind farms. You have to say that there was no interest in the evidence and no interest in rational inquiry. He rushed to judgement. Why? Basically, to get his head on the TV, because that is all he cares about—being part of the media cycle, dominating the media cycle. So, there was Senator Xenophon and his new conservative party, the Nick Xenophon Team, absolutely rushing to judgement.

The Liberals had a choice at this point. The Prime Minister could have been a statesman and could have done what was standard operating procedure for a weather event, which is what this was. He could have come out in support of the emergency services workers, the utility workers who were still out there in the weather trying to connect power, the volunteers, the army and the community, and basically suspended partisan politics to clear the airwaves for disaster related messages. That is what you should do—leave it to the premier and the emergency services minister to conduct the emergency end of what was a very serious weather event in South Australia.

Instead, the Liberals, Senator Birmingham, Mr Barnaby Joyce, Mr Josh Frydenberg, the Prime Minister and others all followed the pied piper of South Australia down this sort of wormhole of blaming renewable energy. That is why we have this ridiculous debate going on in the public about whether it was a wind farm or renewable energy, like solar—at least the member for Hughes had the courage to mention solar. Most of the others did not blame solar, because they know it is popular. What does the actual report of the energy regulator say? It says:

The weather resulted in multiple transmission system faults. In the short time between 16:16 and 16:18, system faults included the loss of three major 275 kV transmission lines north of Adelaide.

Mr Kelly interjecting—

As the member for Hughes says, it then goes on to talk about the wind generation disconnection. It says:

The uncontrolled reduction in generation resulted in increased flow on the main … interconnector—

At Heywood—

to make up the deficit.

This resulted in the Heywood Interconnector overloading. To avoid damage to the interconnector, the automatic-protection mechanism activated, tripping the interconnector. In this event, this resulted in the remaining customer load and electricity generation in SA being lost (referred to as a Black System).

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