Tim Wilson (Goldstein, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Let's face it: that was five minutes of our lives that we will never get back! It was not a hole in one on the mini golf course speech. In fact, it was quite the reverse. It was a long diatribe off the worst drive down the fairway from the member for Shortland. But this is the problem that we now have with the Australian Labor Party and their position on energy—incoherent and lacking an understanding about the fundamental nature of the market and what is necessary to deliver cheaper prices to households and reductions in emissions, or how to make sure that when people turn on the switch the light comes on.

I make these remarks as somebody who, frankly, was proud to oppose the emissions trading scheme introduced by the former Labor government—proud of the fact that I fought the carbon tax, which was fundamentally bad policy. It would have undermined the security we needed in this country, it would have shifted too much of the burden onto technology that wasn't able to deliver the outcomes that Australians needed and, ultimately, it would have delivered price hikes well in excess of even the ones we incurred under the bad policies of the previous government.

That is also why I support the National Energy Guarantee. It's the first policy put down on the table of the nation that actually allows for technologies that produce energy to be compared like for like because they carry obligations. Renewables, with their role of making sure that we provide energy using the forces of the earth, carry with them obligations that they have to be reliable at the same time and they have to compete in a fair marketplace. Fossil fuels—coal or gas, traditional and conventional fuels—have to meet emissions reduction obligations as part of competing against renewables. But you get like for like, apple for apple, not the current opposition's policy, which is simply to favour some technologies, force them into the market and pass the buck onto Australian households and consumers.

That's what the NEG seeks to do—stabilise the market to drive investment to improve the outcome for Australian households. It also spells the end of the bad policy that has infected the national energy grid, led by bad policymaking by people in this place in years past, and the end of programs by allowing them to go to a natural end, like the Renewable Energy Target, which no-one's disputing has forced a lot of renewable energy into the grid but at the incredible expense of reliability—having a stable market—and, of course, at the incredible expense of households, who have had to pick up the bill to subsidise the interests of multinational corporations.

On the other side of this chamber, they're concerned about the top end of town, despite their protests, but they're only interested in the multinational renewable top end of town. They're interested not in consumers or in the interests of Australian households but merely in the people who come in from overseas and bring technology. And they think they should enjoy a subsidy along the way, often to the extent of tens of millions of dollars.

I compare the end of the RET and all these other programs, and what's being done with the NEG, to the end of tariffs, where you had huge distortions in the economy and the market that were mostly picked up by passing the costs on to consumers. The challenge for this government, which it is actually going to meet through the NEG, is to undo that damage to create a stable environment for new investment and to actually have a competitive market operating that seeks to drive down prices and deliver the outcomes that households and consumers need.

What will we see if we go down the NEG path? Yes, we will see an increase in investment, and, yes, it will be technology neutral, so we're going to leave it to the market to decide what to invest. Yes, there will be an increase in supply, including of low-cost energy sources, which will deliver cheaper bills for Australian households. That's a pretty good outcome. What are the obstructions to this path, to building the investment that will grow the future economic opportunity of this nation? It is those that sit opposite, as they carry on like a bunch of schoolchildren over whether they should support this policy, and of course the Victorian state government, who seem to have no interest— (Time expired)

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