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

I am getting back to the bill. This bill talks about Lucas Heights and the work they are doing in nuclear science. In the future this innovation hub will lead us to a greater understanding of nuclear technology. But the reason that we are actually behind in many aspects at the moment, and why we had to go to Argentina to get the OPAL reactor built at Lucas Heights, is our misunderstanding of nuclear power.

We have seen, as I said, the mess that the Renewable Energy Target has caused. If you want a practical example of the failure, just go and look at what has happened in South Australia. Here is a place that now has the proud title of having the highest electricity prices anywhere in the world. It takes a special level of incompetence to go down the track of imposing policies upon your state that give them the highest electricity prices in the world, yet that is what the Labor government has done in South Australia. You would think that, if you had the highest electricity prices in the world, the electricity would at least be reliable, but they've managed to give themselves not only the highest electricity prices in the world but the most unreliable electricity in this nation. We saw blackouts last Christmas. The Australian Energy Market Operator estimates that there is a 30 per cent chance that there will be further blackouts this summer in South Australia.

We've seen the publicity stunt they pulled, the idea that the world's biggest battery can somehow solve it. Look at the numbers for that completely and utterly farcical publicity stunt. It will produce 129 megawatt hours of electricity—129! How much electricity, in megawatt hours, does South Australia need on a hot day? They need close to 50,000. This idea that you can somehow have batteries to back things up is an absolute farce. Just look at the numbers: it will produce 129 megawatt hours out of a daily need of 50,000. For that, it's north of $100 million, and we don't even know what the cost is. Then they have to back that up with 200 megawatts of diesel generators, again at a cost to the taxpayer of over $100 million, that will burn through 80,000 litres of diesel fuel in an hour. If you want to generate electricity in the dirtiest way possible, you probably can't do worse than diesel generators that rip through 80,000 litres per hour, but that is what South Australia are doing.

You would think, holding that up, that everyone would see what an absolute debacle that is, that no-one in their right mind would copy South Australia and that we would thank them for the grand experiment they inflicted upon their people, because we have learnt what not to do. That is what common sense and logic say should happen, but instead we see Labor in Victoria saying: 'We want to copy South Australia. We'll go down the South Australian track, like lemmings off a cliff, and we'll copy South Australia's policies.' When Labor came to power in Victoria, they said it was their policy to get Hazelwood to close down, tripled the coal royalties and chased them out as quickly as they could. What has the Australian Energy Market Operator said of that mess, now they've chased Hazelwood out of town? What's going to be the result? The Australian Energy Market Operator has estimated that, this summer, the state of Victoria faces a 40 per cent chance of blackouts. Not only have they accelerated electricity prices and made them unaffordable to many but they've also given the state a 40 per cent chance of blackouts. You would think common sense, logic, everything that we've been taught, is to look at the examples. We look at the example of South Australia and we say, 'What an economic disaster; that's not what you do.' We look at Victoria—another lemming over the cliff. You see that you cannot go down the path of a 50 per cent renewable energy target. But in this federal parliament the alternative government, the opposition, want to do exactly that. They want to copy Victoria. They want to copy South Australia. They want to bring in a 50 per cent renewable energy target for this nation.

That is a recipe for the complete economic destruction and de-industrialisation of our society. But the Labor Party stand up in parliament and complain—we hear them complain—about how sad they are about the cost of electricity. Yet they have a completely illogical and incoherent policy that they're copying because they want to appeal to those Green, inner-city basketweavers for votes. They are selling out regional areas, selling out the working people of Australia, selling out the mums and dads and the pensioners in their pursuit of Green votes. That's what this parliament has descended into, where we see that policy from the Labor Party.

If we are going forward, we should have a look at what the options are. What is the nuclear option for our electricity generation fleet? Great research in this area is currently being undertaken. Small nuclear modular reactors of 20 and 50 megawatts are being developed. They're still several years down the track, but we should have that option in this country. We should keep all options on the table. We should take advantage of new technology as it comes along, not artificially force-feed higher-cost electricity options to the market because it will win Green votes in the inner city.

I am very proud of the work that ANSTO does. This bill will enable them to continue with their great work. It will bring many more jobs, highly paid jobs, to my electorate, and I commend this bill to the House.

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