Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Mr Speaker. South Australia has, as the honourable member knows, the most expensive electricity in Australia and, worse still, it is the least reliable. It is not only putting businesses at risk and jobs at risk because it is so expensive; the fact that it is not reliable means that businesses have to invest in generator capacity—as they said when I was in the member for Grey's electorate in Port Lincoln—as though we were living in a Third World country where you have to invest millions of dollars in diesel backup generators to ensure that you have your fridges going and your business going. It has been a colossal failure of government by the South Australian Labor Party. How did they get into that problem? It is very simple: they introduced a very large percentage of wind power into the state, they failed to recognise that it has different characteristics to baseload power, they did not put in place the storage or the backup mechanisms to support it, and, frankly, they acted mindlessly and carelessly and incompetently, and South Australians are paying the cost. That is exactly the same approach that the Labor Party has taken federally with their reduction targets, with their renewable targets. They have not thought this through at all. They have demonstrated yet again their incompetence, their negligence, their complacency and the fact that they will always put politics and ideology ahead of the management and the careful discipline of government that Australians expect from those who seek to lead them.

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