Joel Fitzgibbon (Hunter, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

If you could extend me a little bit of latitude, I am conscious of the fact that while we participate in this important debate Brittany Higgins is on her feet addressing the rally outside. I'd like to acknowledge and thank her for her courage and her activism. I'd like to express my sorrow for her experience and wish her the very best into the future. But life goes on inside the building. This is an important debate.

I congratulate the member for Grey, because he has been able to bring a group of people together from all political persuasions to talk about the importance of gas. In this country the gas sector remains a bedrock of the Australian economy, both in consumption terms and in export terms. It's our second biggest export earner. We use it domestically to generate electricity and to power our manufacturing plants. We use it as a feedstock in just about every product we use in our daily lives, including personal protective equipment that we relied upon so much during the COVID period. It keeps us warm in our homes. I see some Victorians here; Victorians are the biggest per capita consumers of gas in the country. In fact, I think the biggest consumers of gas in absolute terms are the Victorians, and yet they are so reluctant to get gas out of the ground. We use it to cook our food, and we use it to heat our water.

Gas provides 25 per cent of our energy consumption. I'm not talking about electricity consumption now. I'm talking about energy. I'm talking about the planes in the air, the cars on our roads, what we consume in our homes and what we consume in industry. By comparison, oil is 38.7 per cent and coal is 29.9 per cent, so, at 25 per cent, it's a big part of our energy supply. It will be an important part for many, many decades to come. Importantly, only 37 per cent of that 25 per cent is used for electricity generation, highlighting what I said earlier. This debate is not just about electricity generation, as important as that is. This debate is about what we rely upon gas to do in our broader communities.

As our coal generators age, they won't be replaced—it's highly unlikely that anyone is going to build a new coal generator in this country. There are those who are hopeful, but I don't think the numbers stack up. In New South Wales 90 per cent of our electricity generation comes from plants that are 30 years old or older, so we've got a problem coming. Renewables are important, but we can't rely on renewables only. To get more renewables into the system, we need more synchronous or firming power. The best, quickest and most cost efficient way of doing that is to get more gas electricity generation into the system. An email in its integrated system plan tells us that to 2040 we will need between six to 19 gigawatts of firming power—that is, between three and 10 Liddell coal-fired power stations. Where do people think this power is going to come from, if we don't get more gas out of the ground and start generating more electricity with gas? The ACCC tells us that we've got problems: we've got a lack of gas, we've got a lack of connectivity and we've got a lack of competition in the gas pipeline sector.

We need to get more gas out of the ground. There will be some communities who don't want it extracted near prime agricultural land, and that's fine. There are plenty of areas where it can be extracted without any threat to agriculture in this country. We should be extracting more. That's why I so strongly support the Narrabri Gas Project in New South Wales. It's why I support the Hunter Gas Pipeline, which will bring more gas from South-East Queensland through the Hunter Valley, fuelling new industrial opportunities and bringing more competition to the network in that part of the world. In the Hunter region, we will lose our coal generators over time. We've got an abundance of renewable projects in the pipeline, but we will need the gas. We've got two important gas peaking stations in the pipeline. One is from AGL at Tomago and one is from Snowy Hydro in Kurri Kurri. I'm very hopeful we achieve at least one of them. I'll certainly be working on behalf of the community to make sure we do, so that we can remain, in the Hunter, the engine room of New South Wales.

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