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

The previous speaker shows that he has never come near a fact in his life, because you do not even have to talk about climate change to understand the economics that are confronting the power sector at the moment. I come from a proud coalmining region. Coalmining in Australia started in the Hunter Valley in 1801. We have 17,000 coalminers still in the Hunter Valley. My neighbour is a coalminer; I can see the largest coal-fired power station in the country from my front window. I am proud of our coalmining heritage, and it has a future. But those opposite are showing wilful economic ignorance when they talk about what the next generation of power production in this country is.

The truth is that our power stations are getting old very rapidly. The average age of the power fleet in New South Wales is 35 years and in Victoria it is 41 years. Thirty-three per cent of the power produced in this country comes from the Hunter Valley, and the four power stations are due to finish up in 2022, 2028, 2033 and 2035. We need alternatives very shortly. Leaving aside the cost of climate, the next coal-fired power station to be built in this country can only be built with a massive government subsidy, because coal-fired power is massively uneconomical. The levelised cost of energy production of the power station options in this country currently stands at a new black coal-fired power station being somewhere between $130 and $160 a megawatt hour—as said by Bloomberg New Energy Finance, not some mad hippie-greenie outfit. For wind it is $65—they are getting $65 a megawatt hour for wind. Large-scale PV is around $100—so it is already cheaper than coal. And rooftop photovoltaics with battery storage, providing true baseline power through solar, is only slightly above $100 an hour, according to RepuTex, and Bloomberg thinks it will be somewhere between $80 and $120 a megawatt hour by 2030. These are economic forecasters' figures—not greenies' figures. So let me repeat that: a new coal-fired power station in this country is more expensive than base load renewable and more expensive than base load gas.

The coalition do not have a clue. The coalition are economically illiterate. They are fossils. They are dinosaurs. And they are doing a great disservice to the workforce. The worst thing you can do is lie to workers, but this mob are happy to lie to workers. They are happy to go to coalminers and people who work in coal-fired power stations and say, 'Don't worry, Sunshine; you can keep doing exactly the same job for the next 50 years.' It is a great disservice to those workers and it is a great disservice to the communities like mine that rely on those jobs. It is a grubby, low act that Australians do not deserve.

We owe workers and communities like mine honesty and a plan for the future. We can have and we do need new base load power in this country, and it will be a combination of gas and—once we get through the current crisis, which this government has done nothing about but talk for the last four years—renewable energy, either base load renewable energy through concentrated solar-thermal or solar PV and storage and wind in a more intermittent variety. That combination is the future of power production in this country. Clean coal is a myth. Clean coal is a lie. The cleanest coal-fired power station in our region produces 700 kilos of carbon dioxide per megawatt hour—closed-cycle gas, 370 kilos; and renewables, obviously zero. There is no such thing as clean coal, and lying to workers and saying that this is the future for Australia is incredibly disrespectful to them and ignores the real challenges of this economy.

I am happy to debate this motion. There is only one side of politics that is operating in an air of reality in this, and that is Labor. The coalition, through ideological reasons, because they do not accept the science of climate change, or pure economic illiteracy, led by the Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce, who is a disgrace—and it is a joke that this country has an economic illiterate as the Deputy Prime Minister—are leading us down the wrong path. I am proud of Labor's climate change policies and I am proud of our energy prices. I am also proud to come from a coal region that has a bright future. But the first thing we owe communities like mine is honesty, and the coalition are just lying through their teeth.

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