Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I welcome the member for Indi's motion on renewable energy. It's a unicorn of a motion. It's all too rare in this parliament, certainly in the four years I've been here, that you ever get a debate about energy, climate change, renewables that deals in facts and figures as opposed to ideology, blind prejudice and fantasy stories that we hear from the government day in, day out.

The motion talks, quite rightly, about regional Australia leading Australia's transition to renewable energy and about the fact that the market operator advises that 15 gigawatts of coal-fired power is going to be retired in the next 20 years. It's not a mad lefty fantasy. The market operator tells us this. Even the Prime Minister's fossil fuel mates that he hand-picked for his dodgy commission to tell us how to get out of the recession that he's presiding over have admitted that renewables plus storage are the lowest-cost forms of energy and electricity generation. The International Energy Agency says to governments around the world: 'Use the trillions of dollars of stimulus to invest in renewable energy. That would be a good idea, and communities should benefit.' But the context that this debate occurs in is key. It's not just about community renewables—and I endorse the contributions made—it is about the government's abject failure over seven years and 19 failed energy policies to provide any certainty for this country about where people can invest, where we're investing in new supply and how we're going to deal with climate change. It's a complete failure.

The Prime Minister's latest effort, in an utterly corrupt farce, is the COVID economic recovery commission process. In March the Prime Minister appointed his mates from the fossil fuel industry: Nev Power, who's on the board of the gas company Strike Energy, and Andrew Liveris, unbelievably, who's on the board of Saudi Arabia's state-owned oil and gas giant Aramco. They won't release their conflict of interest declarations—they're secret, mind. And in this secretive, multimillion dollar exercise, which has no transparency, no accountability at all—just how this Prime Minister likes it—guess what they recommend? The answer is: when his fossil fuel mates get together they say, 'Give us billions of dollars!' Surprise, surprise! That's it; that's the answer. Even worse, they want a pipeline from the east coast to the west coast. That failed, silly idea that has been rejected time after time because it doesn't pass any robust cost-benefit test and never will. This is rent-seeking nonsense worthy of Vladimir Putin's Russia, not Australia.

Now if you read the detail—this came out in a Senate inquiry—there are little reports that are buried in there that say, 'By the way, Prime Minister, you should underwrite the gas supply at fixed prices.' That sounds okay, until you stop and think about what it means. We'll decode it. What it means is: 'Prime Minister, you should promise to pay us and our companies billions of dollars at a guaranteed price for years, even if global prices drop massively.' That's what it means. And when questioned, Nev Power and the fossil fuel mates that the Prime Minister has got in a secret room advising him backed off and said, 'It's not a final proposal; it might not quite be what we mean.' It's what they wrote and it is what they mean. Even in future years, if tankers sail the ocean full of fossil fuels looking for someone to buy them at a cheap price, don't worry, Scott Morrison's legacy will be that the Australian taxpayers will keep paying inflated prices for decades. That's what it means.

The so-called gas recovery is a slogan. The government members' instructions are just to keep saying 'gas recovery'. Gas-fired recovery: it sounds good, like turning on the stove. It's a policy you get when you have a government led by a failed marketing ad man without a plan.

Now in case you think I'm just a mad lefty, I might be a mad lefty, but I'll make three points in closing. One: of course gas and coal will remain part of Australia's energy mix for years to come. That's a fact. Labor supports those jobs. The second fact is that we also support cheaper power. The fact is that renewables are the cheapest form of new energy. For cheaper, cleaner energy, you're going to back renewables. The third point—this is really important, in case people dismiss us as mad, raving lefties—is, let the market rip. I say on this topic let the market rip, because the market has spoken. Consumers have spoken. Even BHP is selling out of thermal coal. If you believe in market economics, as we hear from the government members that they do, if you believe this, as opposed to just saying it and then doing another thing by giving billions of dollars of taxpayer money to your corporate mates in fossil fuel, if you believe this, let the market rip. Don't subsidise any form of power. The market has spoken. It will go to the cheapest, cleanest form of new energy, which is renewable energy. So I thank the member for Indi for allowing a fact based debate.

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