Joel Fitzgibbon (Hunter, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Agriculture) Share this | Hansard source

When I was interrupted by the adjournment last night I was reflecting on the Hunter region, the place I have lived all my life, and more particularly reflecting on the change I have seen in the Hunter in the 21 years tomorrow I have represented that part of the world. I had been spending some time talking about the wonderful attributes of the Hunter region—I would like to do more of that but time is going to defeat me, so I will move on by saying the region has changed very significantly since the closure of BHP in around 1998. It is an increasingly wealthy and more economically diverse place than it ever was. We still have our problems and challenges, obviously—unemployment remains unacceptably high, although much lower than it was when I was elected in 1996. It was then around 13½ per cent—it got to three per cent at one stage during the height of the mining investment boom, and now it floats between five and six per cent. Youth unemployment remains too high, so we have some very solid and important work to do there.

I want to reflect on our energy future and indeed the energy future of the nation, because the reality is that we are heading for an energy crisis. That crisis has been produced by four years of public policy uncertainty. There is no doubt that our energy future will be dominated by renewable and energy storage technologies—there is no doubt about that; it is only a question of when they become the dominant drivers, or underpinners, of our energy policy. But the lengthy transition between now and then will require a transitional fuel, and that is most obviously gas. I am disappointed that the Prime Minister has posed more public policy uncertainty by talking about clean coal. As the member for Hunter, no-one would be more welcoming of a clean coal resurgence than me, but the technology is not there and the energy companies simply are not interested in the investment. But in this country we have an abundance of gas and we need to get that gas to market. We had the whit to ship liquefied natural gas from the Indian Ocean or the Timor Sea, but we do not seem to have the whit to ship it to the eastern seaboard. If someone can tell me we can do it even more competitively—for example with gas pipelines—I would be happy to have that conversation, but LNG as a source provides us with many more options than just domestic gas.

Government needs to provide the policy guidance necessary to bring gas to the eastern state markets, and there could be no better place to build an LNG receiver terminal than in Newcastle. It makes sense. Gas coming to Newcastle can fire new gas-fired generators built in the buffer zones of our current coal-fired generators, each of which is coming to the end of its commercial life. There are four generators in the region, between them producing 10,000 megawatt hours—one will be gone within five years; none of them will exist within 20 years. We have the land, we have the skilled workforce and we have the transmission lines—it makes perfect sense. Gas into Newcastle could also be used to deliver affordable and reliable energy to our manufacturing sector. It is simple: get gas to the eastern seaboard through Newcastle, pipe the gas to where the current generators are, utilise the land, utilise the existing transmission lines and utilise the existing workforce which obviously exists. Of course Newcastle is well placed geographically to then pipe that same gas onto the manufacturing sectors not only in the Hunter region but in and around Sydney and beyond.

This all makes sense, but to get there we do need government policy guidance. The Labor Party had a plan in place for this transition—a legislated plan which would now have been providing certainty to the sector; a plan which included, yes, first, the carbon tax but a tax that within three years would have transitioned to a floating mechanism—a mechanism which, according to Ross Garnaut, would now have carbon trading at $7 a tonne or thereabouts. Instead, Tony Abbott repealed all of that legislation and unravelled that framework, and, very sadly, nothing has been put in its place.

When members of parliament start taking calls from their manufacturers or their abattoirs and the like because they are running out of gas or because they cannot afford the gas it no longer stacks up. They need to ask themselves why, and the answer is that we have had policy uncertainty in this space for far too long. I know it is difficult in the current political environment, but I mean this sincerely: we need some bipartisanship on a national energy policy. We need to get that gas to the eastern seaboard. We need to get that gas to the eastern markets. We need to build baseload generators—they are not going to be clean coal, sadly, from my perspective; as I said, the energy companies are not interested. Gas is the transition fuel. We need gas-fired power generators. It makes perfect sense to put them where the existing coal-fired generators are—we have time because those generators still have some life left in them. The workforce is there and the transmission lines are there. It makes perfect sense. I appeal to the Prime Minister and all those on the other side to bring some bipartisanship to this issue. We are heading for a cliff. We are going to have manufacturers close down, including meat processors, which are close to the heart of, certainly, many in this room. Thousands of jobs in regional Australia will be lost. I am not exaggerating. This is real. It is happening right now, as I speak.

Unless we get some investment certainty in our energy sector that will be the outcome and we will all be the losers. It is time for us all to bind together, start talking in a cooperative fashion and start talking about getting serious about gas as a transitional fuel. Of course, the states will have a role to play. The reality is that there is a lot of coal seam gas out there that could be safely exploited without any threat to agricultural land or indeed the water tables on which agriculture relies. Yes, there will be those say it is not justified, that it will be too great a risk, but there are many out there that can work without any threat to Australian agriculture. Even if we could exploit all the eastern seaboard coal seam gas it would never be enough to meet the demand that is coming. We need big loads of gas, and it is going to have to come from faraway places, either by gas pipeline or by LNG means. If we do not start talking about it soon we are going to be in a world of pain, so I make a final appeal to all those on the other side to have us working as a team on this—Team Australia, if you want to use that term. We have an energy crisis coming and we need to address it.

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