Pat Conroy (Shortland, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Defence Industry) Share this | Hansard source

You love him, obviously. If he's got the recipe for the future, you better get very used to sitting over there.

So you get John Howard to chart out your future and then you go to a safe spot. When you have trauma, you go to a safe place—that's natural. Their safe place is nuclear power, nuclear energy. Whenever they get in trouble, they grip it and the member for Fairfax is obsessed with it. He loves it. He's obsessed with it. What does it mean for power prices? Well, the CSIRO came out with their power price research. They found that firmed-up renewables are $46 a megawatt hour and coal is $141 a megawatt hour. If this is their grand plan, if this is their policy, if this is their vision to get relevant again, you'd think nuclear power might be cheaper than renewable energy and it might be under $41. Well, nuclear power is only $326 a megawatt hour! It's only seven times the cost of firmed-up renewables. That's a great effort.

Before we saw the member for Fairfax, I thought their lowest was the member for Hume, that that was the bottom of the barrel. Now the shadow minister for energy is really taking the cake. This is where this debate is at the moment. On the government side, we've just passed a bill that will end the climate wars, that will give investors certainty, that will allow investors to invest in the clean energy of the future, that will drive lower power prices, that will drive 604,000 new jobs. On the opposite side, they stand for higher power prices and policy irrelevance.

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