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

It's quite the trifecta, isn't it? Doubled wholesale prices, reliability falling and carbon pollution up. It's quite the trifecta! Only a divided government could produce such a result. While the industry is crying out for certainty, while consumers are crying out for certainty, while they want bipartisanship, while they want rational policy making, what do we get out of this government? We got two prime ministers and now we have the member for Warringah acting, essentially, as an opposition leader within the government, contradicting himself in his approach to the RET. He renewed it when he was in office; he's now opposed to it while in opposition—opposition within the government. And we don't hear those interjecting from across the aisle. Why don't we hear them? Because they know I'm talking the truth. Suddenly, there's silence as they think: 'Oh, that's what's happening. That's the trouble. Oh, yes, Nick's right. We are divided. We do have two prime ministers. We have caused a lack of certainty in power.' It takes an incredible amount of chutzpah when you're running this divided, disorganised rabble, producing uncertainty not just in power area but in just about every industry—in the car industry, in the steel industry. In a whole range of areas across public life, we now find uncertainty, unpredictability and a lack of investment. Why? Because we have a government with a prime minister and an opposition leader in it.

When we have those opposite get up and talk like they're living in some sort of Shangri-la at the moment—the speaker before me, so excited about things in South Australia and Queensland and all the rest of it—the truth is: your government got a report called the Finkel report. You ordered it. You asked the Chief Scientist to go out and do it. The report came in. It had 50 recommendations. You then adopted 49 of them, and the one you didn't adopt was the most important—the Clean Energy Target. There's only one reason why you would operate in such a fashion, and that's because you're divided on it, and we all know it.

The member for Port Adelaide has offered, I think, very graciously, some measure of bipartisanship in this area in order to fix this crisis—which we all knew was happening. I talked about gas prices in this parliament in 2013. Yes, I did. You might want to go back and look at the Hansard. All of the problems the Prime Minister talks about today, you could have talked about then. I did, and the member for Throsby did. Manufacturing Australia was doing the rounds in this parliament at that time.

Guess what? You guys got into government in 2013, so it's your responsibility to do something about it. What did you do? You sat on your hands. You've sat on your hands for four years. And now suddenly the Prime Minister wakes up one morning, gets out of bed and says, 'There's a crisis; I'm acting.' What does that acting involve? It involves bringing in the energy companies. Rather than treat them in a respectful fashion, he brings them in for this pantomime. He invites the cameras in and wags his fingers at these CEOs. You wonder why we've got a crisis when the participants are treated in that way and when the best thing that comes out of it is a letter to consumers. I mean, give me a break! And you're going to come in here and brag about that, and go out to your electorates and brag about that—a letter to consumers. 'Oh, aren't we tough!' No-one's going to believe it. They know you're divided. They know you can't provide certainty. They know you're not looking to the future. They know that you're selling snake oil. Every time you go around the place saying you're going to keep these ageing coal-fired power stations open longer than their natural life, people don't believe you. You can keep barking up this avenue and you can keep running crazily towards an ever-receding goal line, or you can actually plan for the future or you can embrace bipartisanship. Or you can embrace the report that you ordered—the Finkel report. Why don't you do that? Why don't you, just for once, engage in rational policymaking in this area rather than running silly scare campaigns?

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