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

or had it read to them—thank you, member for Scullin—they would realise it is condemning this government's chaos. Let me read from it:

Feedback from market participants and investors is that it is more financially secure to invest in renewable resources and that they are seeking greater market and policy certainty to be able to make investments in new dispatchable generation.

That is code that investors can't invest in new dispatchable power because this mob don't have a policy they can invest on. We've had four years of uncertainty. The Energy Council, which is made up of the generators, not hippie-dippies or Greens, have said that their uncertainty is the equivalent of a $50-a-tonne carbon price. If we're serious about solving this energy crisis, we need a clean energy target and bipartisan consensus to drive investment—not for the next two years but for the next four decades. But we won't get it under this government because they are hopelessly divided. They're weak. The Prime Minister's in search of a backbone, and he won't find it. All he'll find is opposition from the member for Hughes, the member for Warringah and Senator Abetz, who are the real masters of that party room.

The great tragedy of this is that the workers and communities in my area suffer the most. It's my workers and communities that suffer. I have the poorest town in all of New South Wales in my electorate: Windale. They're being hit with 20 to 30 per cent power rises. They're in the gun right now. It's my power station workers—just like the power station workers in the member for Hunter's electorate—who are being offered all this false hope, but it's all talk because the government have no plan. The easiest thing a politician can do is lie—is to agree with whoever they are talking to—but we owe them our honesty. We need to say that change is coming and we will work with them. We have a plan, just as the members for Hunter and Port Adelaide talked about previously.

I will not be lectured to about supporting coal workers from this government. I will not be lectured to by them. My neighbours are coalminers. My mates at footy games are coalminers. The blow-ins on the other side have never met a coalminer. They don't care about solving this crisis. They just care about getting through the next week in this place. (Time expired)

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