Tony Pasin (Barker, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

We must be in the post-truth world right now. I can understand why the shadow minister, the member for Port Adelaide, might want to turn this debate on the MPI on energy around. But as he, the member for Boothby and I all know—as do South Australians—we are hostages, as are our constituents. We are now hostage to a failed experiment that is being rolled out in South Australia. Why is that? It is because we have rushed towards renewables. We have rushed towards a technology that provides intermittent power. We have turned our back on baseload generators. In fact, in South Australia, they wanted, on the altar of ideology, to send such a strong message on this that they blew the power stations up. They were not happy with decommissioning them; they had to put gelignite in the boiler and go 'bang'.

And what did we get? We got electricity prices on the spot market in South Australia that are just nonsensical. During this month, there have been times when the spot electricity price in South Australia has been $14,000. You can buy the same unit of power from Victoria for $122. It is coming out of the same power station. It does not make any sense at all.

I thought I might give a few examples of the hostages that have been taken in my state. I can speak of the irrigators in the Riverland, who lived through the millennium drought but who, very shortly, will live through an energy drought. This is because, although the water is, thankfully, running and flowing strongly down the river, they will not be able to afford to lift it. They cannot pump it. They will see their permanent plantings die and wither because they literally cannot afford to take the water from the river to their farms. They are hostage No. 1.

Hostage No. 2 is a very significant manufacturing plant in my electorate. They have been forced to go on to the spot electricity price, despite spending tens of thousands—indeed tens of millions—of dollars on cogeneration plants. They have someone who sits in a room and watches the spot electricity price on an app a bit like the PocketNEM that we have all become familiar with in recent times. This person sits in a room, and, effectively, they press a button, an alarm goes off, and they down tools. The machines are all turned off. I am told they literally pick up the brooms and start sweeping until the electricity price drops again. What does that say about productivity and the need for us to keep driving it? That is hostage No. 2. This is an employer of hundreds of my constituents.

Hostage No. 3 is a restaurant in my electorate, of all things. The restauranteur rang me and said: 'You won't believe it, but I've just assessed my electricity price of January 2016 versus January 2017. I've got the bills side-by-side, Tony—

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