Patrick Gorman (Perth, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Western Australia) Share this | Hansard source

I withdraw, Deputy Speaker. I've said all I need to say about the interesting proposal by a particular individual on the government side for an inheritance tax. And why would we be talking about an inheritance tax when instead we could be doing things like cutting taxes? It's only Labor that has committed to cutting taxes on electric vehicles. At the moment, only 0.7 per cent of cars sold in Australia are electric. In the UK and the EU it's 11 per cent. Let's lift that up, and let's do it by cutting taxes on electric vehicles. At the same time, let's fix some of our energy grid. Let's get more community batteries across this country. Labor has a plan to add another 400 across Australia. It will be a welcome addition. I've currently got one lonely community battery in my electorate, in Yokine. It does a great job, but it would be great to have a few more.

We also need to make sure that we start to do the big heavy lifting of rewiring the nation. I'll end my comments talking about rewiring the nation. We know that the electricity grids of Australia are desperately outdated. They were built in the last century—it shows. We've had 22 energy policies from this government, and Australians, again, have paid the price. If we want to have more batteries and if we want to have more renewables, we need a modern, refreshed grid. This is how we act on climate change, it's how we lower power prices and it's how we ensure more productivity in Australia. We know that Australia is uniquely placed to be at the forefront of the renewable energy revolution that we are going to see happen across the world. But we need a government that genuinely believes in climate change, not one that simply believes in advertising about what they say they are doing on climate change. I'll conclude my remarks by saying that, if we act on rewiring the nation and on renewable energy, it means more jobs, more secure jobs, more secure power and more affordable power. And it means that Australia won't get left behind as the global economy transitions.

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