Pat Conroy (Shortland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Infrastructure) Share this | Hansard source

I was listening well, because that was a foretaste for the civil war that we will see in their party room tomorrow, the civil war that the member for Hughes and his allies have been running for the last five years, the civil war that is the reason this government has flip-flopped on energy policy so often. We had Direct Action, which did nothing for energy transformation. We then had the glorious period of the emissions intensity scheme, which the Minister for the Environment and Energy floated for 12 hours. He did a great interview on the ABC. After that he got ripped to shreds by the member for Hughes, Alan Jones and ex-Prime Minister Mr Abbott, and within 12 hours he folded. I've had cases of flu that have lasted longer than energy policy in this country. Then we had the clean energy target, under Chief Scientist Alan Finkel, which lasted for about six months. Again the government folded to the backbench insurgency. And now we have the NEG, which the member for Hughes is trying to undermine. He's undermining it very actively right now.

I turn to the other part of this motion, which is about ending energy subsidies and having a level playing field. I couldn't agree more with the member for Hughes, except he didn't mention one subsidy—the negative environmental externality of carbon pollution. Any good economist knows that a free negative environmental externality is a subsidy to that production because it imposes a cost on the broader economy. There is no greater example of that than carbon dioxide spewing into the atmosphere from the fossil fuel industry, from conventional thermal energy generation. That's why the last Labor government put a price on carbon, because we wanted to level the playing field, place a hard cap on emissions and give industry the best incentive to reduce their carbon emissions. So, if the member for Hughes were serious about cutting down on subsidies, he'd talk about the negative environmental externality that is carbon pollution. Yet again he is running down renewable energy.

The fact is, every independent expert and every independent commentator in this field agrees that the cheapest and most reliable form of new generation in this country is a combination of renewable energy, solar and wind, backed up by peaking gas and pumped hydro storage. Every single independent commentator has agreed on that. It is only the fact-free zone in the coalition party room that doesn't agree that that is the cheapest and most reliable form of replacing our ageing coal-fired power stations, which have reached or are approaching the end of their life. They are very old; they are breaking down, as we saw with the Tomago example two weeks ago, which the member was so keen to talk about. Two weeks ago, three of the four power stations in my region were losing units, because these power stations are very old and very expensive to run. We need urgent replacement, with renewable energy backed up by gas and pumped hydro, and possibly battery storage.

We've got a great opportunity here. Not only is this cheaper and more reliable; it is the basis for us becoming a renewable energy export superpower. We will be able to export that energy either directly through high-voltage DC connectors to South-East Asia, as they are talking about in the Pilbara region right now, or through power to gas, converting that solar and wind energy into ammonia or hydrogen and exporting that to North Asia, where it's desperately needed. That will give us a great export industry in the future. Once the world makes its transition, we will also be the home of cheap energy. We will regain that standing of cheap energy because we've got the best solar resources in the world. So, when it comes to energy-intensive manufacturing, whether it's aluminium smelting, bauxite refining or steelmaking, we've got a great opportunity to have those industries powered by renewable energy, backed up by gas and storage, and we will be the cheapest possible energy producer supporting those industries into the future.

On renewable energy metals, we have 60 per cent of the world's current lithium reserves that can be mined, so there are great opportunities. All we need is a plan, support for renewable energy zones, and a vision, and the Labor Party opposition provides that. By contrast, we've got a civil war being run by dinosaurs in the coalition party room, by the member for Warringah and by my friend the member for Hughes, and this nation is suffering because of that civil war.

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