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

I will not be repeating the language used by the member for Hughes. He always gets himself a bit overexcited in these debates, and in the flurry of facts out comes a bit of language. Interestingly enough, at the end of it he admitted what he is really on about—that is, getting rid of the Renewable Energy Target. I look forward to seeing him out there on top of his constituents' roofs, tearing off solar panel after solar panel, chucking them on the road. That is what he will be doing. He is against renewable energy. That is what he is against. Let's make no mistake about it—and I see him exiting the chamber.

The motion sponsored here by the member for Bendigo is a sensible motion. It talks about the challenges that are before us in taking what were a series of state-run monopolies that have been bolted together into a national market where generation has been privatised and then disaggregated. The poles and wires are largely now a system of privately run monopolies. That is essentially what has happened. We had, I guess, a system that worked pretty well before this, but now we are approaching a system that, in my view, does not really work for anybody.

We are facing some very serious situations in relation to many of these brown coal assets. I will talk about the one in South Australia at Port Augusta, with its mine at Leigh Creek. The only reason that was put there in the first place was that Sir Thomas Playford got sick of the deliveries of black coal from New South Wales. They often would not arrive, for one reason or another, particularly during the war years—but even in the postwar years. So South Australian needed its own generation capacity. We are now seeing that happen again. We are now seeing a Premier with a plan. We have had to reassert control over our state's energy market, and that is what Premier Weatherill has been doing.

You might ask yourself: why? It is because we have a complete absence of national leadership in this country—a complete absence of national leadership. What we have at the moment in the Prime Minister is a national commentator. He wants to commentate on things. He is there every day in question time talking about South Australia, talking about Victoria and Hazelwood, and, bizarrely, talking about New South Wales. New South Wales has a high level of coal dependency and a Liberal state government but still had to have load shedding this summer. It still had to effectively turn the nation's largest aluminium smelter off—and we all know what the company said about that.

We have the national commentator, who, whenever he is presented with a problem, is a bit like a mirror: he is looking into it. In the absence of a national energy plan, in the absence of national action, we get the photo opportunities out the front of the Snowy Mountains. Then we have the alternative Prime Minister in the government providing us with his views. The member for Warringah is all for action. He is in the Herald Sun giving a lot of false hope to workers, but at least he has an idea—not like the Prime Minister, who is looking into things. There is a complete absence of action.

South Australia has a plan and is asserting control over its—

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