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

What a tired charade of a speech from the minister! Even he didn't have the energy to completely utter the myths and untruths they perpetuate. I feel like saying to them, 'Could someone get him an energy drink.' He looked like he was about to collapse halfway through it, and that's because his heart really isn't in it, because this is about position No. 8 for him and this government on energy policy. The truth is they're in their fifth year of government and have managed to completely mismanage energy policy over that entire time. And why have they done that? Because they don't believe in anything except for the petty pursuit of electoral power. Ultimately it's my constituents and the constituents of everyone on this side of the House who pay the price for this mismanagement.

The government have made massive mistakes in energy policy. The first one was that they abolished the emissions trading scheme. By abolishing the emissions trading scheme, they destroyed certainty in the market and destroyed the price signal that was bringing in gas-fired power, which was always going to be the complement to renewable energy. All the modelling for all the legislation that they voted for at given points—the Prime Minister certainly did; he seemed to forget about it in question time, but he voted for it—assumed that gas-fired power would complement renewable energy coming into the market. But they abolished the emissions trading scheme. They dillydallied around the Renewable Energy Target, but eventually they decided to keep it. That meant that more renewable energy came into the market. At the same time, they destroyed investment certainty for dispatchable power, and that's why we're in our current situation.

In their four years of government, we saw seven coal-fired power stations close down. And three of them were in states with Liberal governments. So you can't blame Labor for it. You perpetuate this blame game, but closures of coal-fired power stations occurred under Liberal state governments—seven coal-fired power stations with a total combined capacity of 4,000 megawatts. AEMO has pointed out that we've lost 5,000 megawatts of base-load power over the last decade—and 4,000 of the 5,000 megawatts have come under this government. So they can do their blame game, but the truth is they have been mismanaging power policy since September 2013.

And what have we seen now? They're walking away from the clean energy target. The minister and the Prime Minister don't have the ticker to take it to their party room. And what's the result of all this? We've seen a 75 per cent increase in power prices in Sydney. That is, on average, a $1,000 hit to consumers in our largest city. And that's for people doing it tough, that's for mums and dads on really tight incomes—when wages growth is actually negative, a $1,000 hit to power prices. We've seen a third of renewable energy jobs go. At the same time, renewable energy jobs have gone ahead in leaps and bounds everywhere else—2.5 million clean technology jobs in the United States alone—and we've lost a third of ours.

Why have we done this? Why has this occurred? Because we've got a spineless Prime Minister bereft of any ticker. And there's probably only one person who's more ashamed of the Prime Minister than the people on this side, and that's 'Leather Jacket Malcolm', the member for Wentworth, the man who went on Q&A with his leather jacket, the man who crossed the floor to vote for the CPRS—although he forgot about it today. He's probably more ashamed of his behaviour than even the Labor members of parliament. He wouldn't recognise the man he is now. He is a man who has junked every belief to stay in power, a man who has junked every intellectual belief in the market to stay in power. And it's just not doing him any good. We've seen 19 Newspolls in a row. There are 11 more to go. If he repeats the bluster we saw in question time, they're coming soon.

I've got a message to the Prime Minister and the government. If you're going to be Abbott-light, if you're just going to ape the member for Warringah, there's no point. At least that guy believed in something. He believed in the wrong things, but he believed in what he said. We get three-word slogans from the current Prime Minister. We get the blame game. We get a continuation of the chaos in the energy sector, a continuation of electricity bills $1,000 higher. We get more power stations closing down, more uncertainty and more pressure on our consumers and our households who are doing it tough. Shame on you, government.

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