Garth Hamilton (Groom, Liberal National Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is good to hear a reasonable voice from the Labor side. I will offer a slightly different view from Groom. We have always described ourselves as energy agnostic in our area. We have a wonderful thermal coalmine that we hope is about to start up again. We have gas. We have solar power. We have wind just on the verge. We have a hydro plant on the way. And we have had long discussions about hydrogen coming into the Toowoomba region. We do what works. That is our approach and it has worked very well for us.

Going to the legislation—the Climate Change Bill 2022 and related bill—this is absolutely a triumph of politics over policy. The Prime Minister and minister have made very, very clear in repeated statements that this legislation is not necessary. It is entirely the government's right to set their targets, and they have done that. That work has been done. Targets have been set. Nothing that we debate here will change that or impact on that.

What is this legislation about? For people in a regional community like mine, this legislation is about enabling projects to be killed by stealth. That is what this legislation enables. We have seen this in the UK. I'll refer to my time as a project manager delivering major projects very similar to these in the UK. We saw a high-speed tube under the cover of legislation very similar to this attacked by green lawfare trying to stop that project. It's amazing to think that the Greens would try to stop the biggest public transport project—in fact, the biggest project—going on in Europe at the moment. A massive public transport project is trying to be stopped. This legislation would enable that. We have seen them try to stop highway maintenance projects under cover of this sort of legislation. We have seen how important Heathrow's third runway is to the UK. Their entire economy relies upon their connection to Europe and the rest of the world yet we saw green lawfare trying to stop the runway under the cover of the sort of legislation.

So what does this mean for people in Groom? Let's think about the big projects coming our way. We have been fighting for years to get passenger rail from Brisbane to Toowoomba. That connection that we rely upon will make a huge difference to our economy, to our community. Under the cover of this legislation, green lawfare will try to stop that, I absolutely guarantee. Road maintenance—let's talk about the Gore Highway, the Warrego, the New England, all of which require significant ongoing maintenance. In the UK these things were \ challenged and tried to be stopped because they increased traffic movements. That is exactly what we would like to do, increase traffic movements on that because that is us getting our product to market. That is how a regional economy exists. Heaven forbid, the second road to Highfields, which is an incredibly important road project so vital for the growth of our region in Groom, is a project very similar to what was challenged in the UK. Again, if we want to expand the Wellcamp Airport, it would be able to be challenged by green lawfare under the cover of this legislation.

I point out Green lawfare is not hypothetical to us in Groom. We have sat and watched for 15 years the New Acland coalmine be attacked by activists through the courts with the sole intent of stopping this coalmine. This is not hypothetical. We have watched this happen. We have watched the town of Oakey be stripped of investment, be stripped of jobs. We are watching our people leave and take jobs elsewhere. The local economy is suffering because of this approach, what I call it the Palaszczuk approach, where the Premier never has to say no herself but she just allows these projects to die a death of a thousand lawsuits at arm's length from her government.

This legislation that moves the targets from the executive powers to the legislative gives licence for the Prime Minister to do exactly the same. The Prime Minister will run the country the way that the Premier is running Queensland. For those in my patch, that's not a particularly good thing. When we look at what this approach is about, enabling this sort of lawfare, enabling things to be stopped by activists, removing executive power and executive judgement on these projects, it is about stopping things. It's about taking options off the table. It is about reducing emissions by reducing economic activity. So what we end up with is fewer things happening. In regional communities like ours that rely upon this significant infrastructure to keep us connected, to enable our industries, to enable our economy, what this means is we will see less of that.

I very much welcome the debate that others have raised here on nuclear energy. It enables a credible conversation about building our energy capacity, about facing our future energy needs. I very much welcome that conversation. It is something new, something challenging, and I acknowledge that. This debate has been frozen in time since the 1980s. It was over a generation ago that decisions were made about nuclear, back when Midnight Oil was still producing good albums, and those decisions may have been right at the time. I don't know, maybe they were right at the time. Maybe when there was no question about how much coal we should be using, these decisions were right. Maybe the cheapness of coal meant nuclear wasn't the right answer. But that situation is not the one we are facing today. When we are speaking about nuclear now we are speaking about today's technologies, new and emerging technologies, not Soviet-era reactors. We aren't back in the past with Ivan Drago; we're talking about what is happening now.

I noticed again today that the minister laughed at, scoffed and mocked the very idea of nuclear. Now, it was very clear that he made efforts to do that. It was a little bit of Kabuki theatre, I think, showing off just how much he thought this was a silly idea. Well, if the economics don't stack up, why are countries like France, Japan, South Korea, Sweden, the US and the UK adopting this technology? Why are they doubling down on it? If this is so laughable, why are these major countries that have similar commitments and that are reducing their emissions choosing this technology? There are two answers: either the minister knows something that they don't know, or they know something that the minister doesn't know. I'm going to go with the market on this one. I'm going to go with the market. That's just what my side tends to do. Market led decision-making tends to be the best in the long run.

There is a decision being made by modern economies to embrace this conversation. If there's anything that we can add to it, it's that if we want to have a credible position going forward then we need to have this conversation—and I acknowledge that it's challenging. But instead we tend to find ourselves here debating legislation that the Prime Minister himself has described as unnecessary. I strongly believe that we should be opening ourselves to a conversation on a credible energy policy that builds on this side of the House's legacy of a technology led approach and that safeguards those regional jobs with regional projects and regional people.

It's extraordinary that, within this short time into a new government, we're seeing a real divergence on energy policy. We're seeing the approach of stopping things, of taking options off the table, of staying with decisions on technologies from a generation ago—reducing emissions by reducing economic activity versus the approach on this side of the House, which is to open ourselves to a conversation about the latest technology, to open ourselves to what other major economies are doing around the world to address the challenges we face. I think that that decision will be very, very clear. We're willing to engage in it. We acknowledge the challenges that talking about nuclear brings. We acknowledge that technology is advancing every day that we delay this conversation. Technology continues to advance. But we are open to it.

If this legislation has highlighted anything, it's that having targets as your focus is one thing but that not being willing to engage in a conversation about the how of today is of no value to the Australian people.

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