Damian Drum (Nicholls, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

It's an interesting topic for this debate—that apparently this government has somehow or other abandoned the Australian resources industry. Looking at the facts, it couldn't be anything further from the truth. Our resources are demanding record prices. Thermal coal prices are soaring and gas prices are soaring. Quantities are up, so our exports are increasing. Employment numbers in the sector are high. Yet somehow or other the opposition thinks that we as a government have abandoned this sector. It is quite amazing, really.

When you listen to most of the opposition talk about this, you find it's not about the sector at all; it's about net zero 2050. Therefore, you look at the record of the government in relation to reducing emissions, and it is a fantastic record by any account. Our commitments under Kyoto 1 have been met and those under Kyoto 2 have been met. We were criticised relentlessly throughout all of those programs and told we were never going to meet those targets, but we did. We were criticised relentlessly and told we were never going to meet our Paris targets. They were saying, 'The only way you're ever going to meet those Paris targets is by some clever accounting, when you take over the surplus that you accumulated with Kyoto.' But that's not true either. We're going to meet our Paris commitments.

Now I'll look forward to some of the other things we're doing in relation to reducing emissions. Why doesn't anybody ever give this government credit for Australia being a nation that leads the world in rooftop solar, ahead of Germany and Japan? You can add those two together and they just equal the amount of rooftop solar that we have in Australia, on a per capita basis. The things that we are doing in agriculture, with additives and supplements to reduce the methane being emitted by stock, are, again, leading the world. There are the policies put in place by the Minister for Agriculture and Northern Australia in relation to sequestering carbon within the soil, putting together some reserves on less productive farmland to ensure that we can sequester carbon within those timber reserves.

As the previous speaker from the coalition said, there are two ways that we can get to the place where we all want to be—that is, a clean environment. We could try to do it with taxes, and we know that that's the Labor way. But, Mr Deputy Speaker, look at the recent technology advancements in solar panels. Over the last five years the cost of solar panels has effectively halved, and their efficiency has doubled. We would be reasonably confident that we will get similar advancements in technology surrounding batteries and the technology surrounding hydrogen, but at the moment they're just not there. The advancements that we are yearning for simply do not exist. We're confident that that's where we're going. We're confident we'll get to where we want to be. If you want to just jump in with a blindfold on, good luck! But we don't want regional Australia to take on the same risk. It's only reasonable that the National Party, in looking after people in the most energy intensive areas and in looking after the poorest people in Australia, who have the most trouble paying their energy bills and who will be at risk if we put in place policies that force the cost of energy up, want to put in place safeguards. It is something that we feel very comfortable with. Yes, I think there's every chance that we will be in a situation where we do get the technology that we need. But, right at the moment, industry is charging ahead, and industry needs dispatchable power, and we simply don't have dispatchable power in our renewables at the moment. We haven't got Snowy Hydro 2.0 built. We haven't got enough battery within our solar farms. Our large scale-wind—we still don't have enough battery there. And effectively we haven't got hydrogen to where we need to get it.

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