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

It's always great to stand up and talk about the achievements that the coalition government has achieved when it comes to emissions reduction. It's incredible how, in such a highly informed place such as the Australian Parliament House, everybody from the Labor Party, somehow, would rather forget to mention the fact that Australia is leading the way when it comes to rooftop solar. We are leading countries like Germany and Japan. We are leading every country in the world, and not just by a small way; we are leading the world by the length of the straight. With the uptake of rooftop solar sitting somewhere around one in every four to one in every three houses, we have a great opportunity to build on that start.

People from the Labor Party and the Greens want to say, 'How can you trust the coalition to go forward without legislation?' Well, the greatest indicator of future behaviour is always past behaviour. We're standing there in front of the Australian people saying, 'We signed up to previous agreements in Kyoto, Kyoto 1 and Kyoto 2, and we beat those targets easily.'

Up until about two years ago, the term 'net zero by 2050' wasn't actually a thing. The criticism from the climate warriors of the world was all about, 'Australia, you're not going to meet your commitments from Paris,' the agreement that we signed in 2015. Effectively, that was talking about base figures from 2005 and how we were going to go against that base year by the time we got to 2030. We were criticised continually by those opposite, saying, 'You're not going to get there, and the only way you're going to get there is with some sneaky form of accounting.' Well, all that stuff was wrong. They were wrong then and they're wrong now.

The opportunity is for the Australian government to look the Australian people in the eye and say, 'We're going to go to Glasgow and we're going to make this commitment but, at the moment, the technology doesn't quite exist for us to get there.' That's just being honest with the Australian people. If you're honest with the Australian people, you have to say to them that the technology we need to get us there doesn't quite exist at the moment. It's not far away. At the moment we're sending some exports of hydrogen to Asia, but it's made from coal. We're also in the process of sending some hydrogen off to Asia again, but it's made from gas.

If we listened to our friends in the Labor Party, they'd say that neither of those technologies are good enough. They want us to be able to send hydrogen overseas and use hydrogen here, provided it's made from solar. But at the moment the cost of doing that is about four times the commercial rate that we need. So if anybody over there wants to go to the Australian people and say, 'Oh, we're happy to go into hydrogen but it's going to cost you four times the cost for energy that you pay currently,' do they want to have that conversation with the Australian people? No, they won't, because they're not honest enough to have that conversation.

We just need to be straight. We're putting in our plan that there are billions of dollars which will go into battery technology. We're going to invest heavily—we already are and we're going to invest more. We're going to invest serious dollars—again, into the billions—in hydrogen technology and battery storage. And we're going to continue with the plan which we started four years ago for pumped hydro and Snowy 2.0. That's going to be a significant base energy source for us.

And we're not going to be lectured to by these countries in Europe either. The 20 leading countries in Europe are effectively all leaning on nuclear to prop up their base energy mix. That's fine for them—they're lucky enough to be able to do that. But, again, the people who we're arguing with here in our energy mix don't want to hear about us joining the opportunity to have nuclear in our energy mix. They don't want that and they're not going to allow that—at the moment; I'm hoping that the decision and the conversation within Australia surrounding nuclear as a base energy mix may change in the coming years.

I think that people who want to stand in this place and talk about the Australian government's contribution to net zero 2050 need to have a touch of honesty about it. They need to acknowledge the achievements that we have done so far. We have been able to achieve all of these previous agreements without legislation and I don't understand, quite rightly, how, all of a sudden, our ability to meet net zero 2050 and our ability to continue to meet our Paris agreement have become contingent upon legislation. It just doesn't make any sense.

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