Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

The member for Kennedy is exactly right; they are bird choppers. Several times this month the total electricity being generated by the 1,000 wind turbines that we have around this country, spread from South Australia—I see the member for Port Adelaide is here—to Tasmania, Victoria and New South Wales was zero. That is not enough to run one 20-watt light bulb, yet we have spent billions and billions of dollars in subsidies. This is why we must have enough base-load generating capacity in this country. This is why the renewable energy target costs us so much. It undermines base-load generators and they leave the market. That creates uncertainty, along with the policies of the Greens and the Labor Party, so no-one will invest in base-load electricity generation capacity in this nation. That pushes wholesale prices up, and that is what we are about to see in this nation.

We also need a competitive energy target. If we are going to afford all the things that we continually hear being whinged about by the Labor Party, if we want to afford more money for pensions and social security, more money for people who need help, you have to have an economic base that creates the wealth. But what we have done by privatising useless wind turbines and the renewable energy target is make electricity generation in this nation internationally uncompetitive. If we do that, we simply cannot afford all the things that we need. This morning we had another warning, from Glencore, in The Australian Financial Review:

Given the current electricity prices and uncertainty around future supply, we need to consider options for shutting our smelter and refinery [and] ship copper anodes direct to market and/or refine at one of our other plants offshore.

Offshore means outside of Australia. They said:

… the investment environment in Australia has materially changed. The current uncertainty and escalating costs do not support further investment in these assets at this time.

Mr Keogh interjecting—

And the member over there laughs. You, sir, are a joke! You do not know the damage that you are causing to your nation. You do not understand the damage that you are causing to your constituents. You are an absolute embarrassment to this parliament; you are an embarrassment to this nation. We have people this winter that will not be able to afford turning their heaters on because of the policies of you and the Labor Party. You come into this parliament and you laugh and joke about it. You are an absolute disgrace. I am sick to death of people in the Labor Party coming in here with this whingeing and this whining, and being happy to see electricity prices increase in this nation. It is about time we say how important electricity prices are rather than sit in here and make these smart comments. It is an absolute disgrace.

If we going to get this economy firing, if we are going to provide jobs for the young people of this country, if we are going to create the prosperity and wealth that we need, we must have affordable and low-cost energy prices. And that means we must have affordable coal and gas baseload power. We can build as many wind turbines as we like to feel good about ourselves and we can get all warm and fuzzy about it, but unless we have the baseload capacity in this nation our nation is going to go backwards and we are going to be unable to afford all of the things that we want to pay for in this nation.

I call on all members of good conscience in this parliament to put aside their ideological biases, to put aside their almost religious belief in wind turbines and to think about the constituents in their electorate that will struggle this winter to afford their electricity bills. Under the previous Labor government, we saw a 100 per cent increase. We have to take strong measures to get electricity prices under control. And if you want to see what happens with the policies of a 50 per cent renewable energy target that the Labor side are promoting, just go and have a look at the disaster that is in South Australia. That gives us a window into the future, and that is not what I want to see from my country.

With that, I commend this bill to the House.

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