Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the honourable member for his question. We all know very well what the impact of Labor's policies have been. What we have seen is unaffordable power and unreliable power. We've just come from a press conference where the Energy Market Operator's Audrey Zibelman has described how she has to intervene again and again in the South Australian market to keep the lights on because of the instability in that market created by the force-feeding of masses of intermittent renewables like wind without any regard for stability or backup or storage.

What we've seen with the Labor Party's approach to energy has been a triumph of ideology over good sense. What we need now is the engineering and the economics. They are what guide our energy policy, and we have seen the work of engineers and economists on the Energy Security Board with their recommendation. The National Energy Guarantee recommended by the Energy Security Board—established by COAG as one of the recommendations of the Finkel review—ensures that Australians will be able to afford to pay their electricity bill and that the lights will stay on. That is vitally important. And, by combining climate and energy policy, you have a mechanism that ensures we deliver our commitment to cut our emissions in accord with the Paris Agreement and, at the same time, deliver the reliability that we need.

What that will do is bring more investment into the system, and investment of every kind—investment in coal, in gas, in renewables, in storage. It is a genuinely level playing field. The subsidies have got to come to an end. The clean energy sector, the renewables sector, say that they are competitive, and so they are. So they are. And now they have the opportunity to compete.

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