Barnaby Joyce (New England, National Party, Shadow Minister for Veterans' Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I didn't interrupt you, and you should be polite. There are a range of issues here. First of all, the market has been very aware of electric vehicles for a long period of time. In fact, a lot of the research for electric vehicles and batteries is done by 3ME in Armidale. They are then constructed from a chassis that's imported from Brazil—well, they're not constructed, they're just assembled, in Newcastle. The place they use those electric vehicles is down the coalmines that the Labor Party is intent on closing down. We also have electric technology in forklifts. We have electric technology, in a minor form, in scooters and in golf buggies. The market is very aware of this technology. It is not new.

The reason it hasn't taken off is that it's not appropriate to so many areas—that's why it hasn't. People aren't dumb. If they can make money, they'll go out and make money. They don't need any inspiration to make a buck. When we talk about the dumping ground, where do you think the dumping ground for electric vehicles is going to be because we don't make them in Australia? The dumping ground for electric vehicles will be Australia.

There are a range of reasons for not taking up electric vehicles, and I have to make the chamber aware of this. The first one is range. A Tesla has a range of about 470 kilometres. There is nothing wrong with that. It's just that it's way beyond the price range of people who live in a weatherboard-and-iron to be able to buy. The other thing is that, when you don't have electric fast-charging stations, and even with 117 fast-charging stations—Australia's a big place, the size of Western Europe. That means it takes about 27 hours to charge one from a house supply. What happens if you need to get to the hospital? What happens if your kid gets an asthma attack?

And the other thing is of course that people in poor areas don't have the money to buy new cars. If I go to the areas around me and the hills around where I live—I must admit I'm very humbled; at some of those booths I get over 90 per cent of the vote—I will not find a new car in that village. I will not find a new car in many of those areas. I'm proud of my people. It's just that they don't have the money to buy them. They don't have $60,000 to buy an electric vehicle. They work within a budget of around $10,000 to $20,000. And, if you want to test that, go and see the second-hand car lot and see what's moving, what's selling.

The other thing is they're just unsuitable. In the last two months of wet weather, I've had to use the winch on my Toyota three times: once for a funeral director who got bogged on the roads, once for a tray back that had slipped off onto the road—and it was the only way we could get in—and once for a small truck. Now, people say that's out of scope. Well, it's not. That's the life we live. That's what we do. And that sort of technology is not available in electric cars. In many areas it just would not be accessible, it would not be appropriate, and it'd get knocked to pieces.

The other thing about electric vehicles is that, when they're turned over, just like forklifts, they're basically worthless. That's the end. It's not like an HQ, a WB or an HJ Holden, which even decades later people are still using because they can fix them up. And the ideas, the technology and the nous to fix them up are seen through the local people. A lot of them have taught themselves. But the capacity to do that with electric vehicles is not there. So we're forcing on poor people literally another caveat, another cost, and we're saying to them—for a policy which, let's be frank, on the whole is a policy for white, urban, small upper-class areas in cities, where it's an appropriate car, because they're small distances and there's ample capacity to recharge. But that is not the case in regional areas. If you go to Yuendumu, you're not going to be using an electric vehicle. And that Tesla—and I've been reading about it—that's going to circumnavigate Australia is not going to Cape York. It's going to areas where it can recharge. And so, what you're saying, even by that statement, is that there are certain people you're going to isolate.

We, on this side, believe in choice. If you want to buy an electric vehicle, knock yourself out—buy it. And, if you don't want to buy it, then why is the government subsidising the actual people who could afford it the most? If you want to subsidise something, subsidise poor people into a vehicle, full stop. That's what you should be subsidising people into.

We've also seen those opposite talk about technology. You have to completely rejig the whole power grid to get the capacity for people in their homes to recharge their cars. You're going to need about six kVA per house, and they just don't have that. This is a massive cost to try and bring this into our nation. Even then, you're going to have periods of a massive peak in power at night, when there's no solar and less wind. You're going to have a massive peak in power and the inability for it to actually work.

Those opposite don't actually sit down and go through the nuts and bolts of this. When you come up with ideas, like wanting to go to zero emissions, and you need base-load power, rather than talking about how smart you are in manufacturing and industry—which I hope you are—why do you completely ignore nuclear power? You parody it. Why do you run it down? You say it's a stupid idea. So let's go through all the stupid countries that are currently developing, or are a part of, the small modular reactor industry and are going to get there before us: the Czech Republic, Romania, Argentina, Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, China, Russia, Finland, South Africa, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Germany, South Korea and Qatar—all these dopey people, all these incredibly dopey countries, who are once more, in a new piece of technology—like mobile phones, like motor vehicles, like everything else—just going to leave Australia behind. And, ultimately, we'll end up with small modular reactors. It's just inevitable. It's like saying, 'I'm going to ban iPhones' or, 'I'm going to ban fridges' or, 'We're going to continue walking rather than using a motor vehicle at all.' It's going to come in.

Let's look at the dumb companies that are developing it: Hyundai, Hitachi, Westinghouse, General Electric, NuScale, Amec, Rolls-Royce, Skoda, Neutroelectric, KGHM. Do you think Rolls-Royce is stupid? Do you think Westinghouse is stupid? Do you think General Electric is a dumb company? Do you think they're doing this because they think it's a dumb idea? No, they're once more just leaving us behind.

Rolls-Royce is developing a 470-megawatt small modular reactor. It will power Leeds, a city of over 500,000 people—one reactor. The size of it is 16 metres by four metres—obviously the cooling capacity is there. Just think of that: 16 metres by four metres powering something the size of Leeds, and they believe they'll have it on the market by 2029. And the Labor government is saying, 'No, we're not going do that.' They giggle and make these foolish statements in the parliament, because they just haven't done their homework.

These are going to be factory-made; they're modular. With anything made out of modular parts in a factory, of course, over time they're going to get safer, cheaper and smaller. But our nation, with the Labor government talking about industry and innovation and being smart—well, they're not smart enough, nor are they courageous enough to see the bleeding obvious right in front of their face and be part of it. No, we'll get left behind. It'll be yet another product we import.

We had other statements—for instance, the Prime Minister said, 'You wouldn't bring a rock of uranium in here; please don't do that.' All that does is spell out how ignorant he is of it. Uranium-235 is about 0.7 of one per cent radioactive. To make it work, you have to upscale it. It needs to go to about four or five per cent to use in small modular reactor, and if you wanted it in a nuclear weapon you'd have to take it to 90 per cent, which is incredibly difficult. So, unless you intend to eat it, or break it down with nitric acid and inject it, then you've got no problems with it.

You should do a little bit more homework, rather than try to look like the most beautiful thing in the parliament. What we're seeing here is the Labor Party, once more, without the courage to lead, making us the dumb country—once more, the dumb country left behind. Even the AWU, from the right wing of the Labor Party, is in favour of nuclear energy. The CFMMEU is in favour of it, but not the Labor Party in Canberra. They're not in favour of it. They're left behind.

But here is Zoolander making his statement—such a beautiful man. He should get a bigger repertoire—and a bigger suit, because he is almost busting out of the one that he's got.

What we are seeing is this unfortunate capacity for us to be the sillier country as we see the rest of the world racing ahead. The most recent application approved by the United States was for NuScale's 77-megawatt small modular reactor, built in the factory. One of them would do Tamworth. People say, 'Where will you have them?' Where you currently have power stations would be the most logical position. So you don't have to build this myriad of transmission lines across the area.

The nuclear issue, believe you me, is vastly more palatable to regional areas than what is going on now. In the town of Walcha, 550 wind towers are going up around the town, turning it into an industrial park. It is the only thing you can find that will bring the Greens, the Nationals, Labor supporters and the independents all into the same room, basically saying, 'What is the inspiration to turn our area into an industrial park? It's not what we had in mind.' You need about 50 acres for one wind tower. Because it's an intermittent source, they are about 33 per cent effective and they commercialise out at around two per cent. So you would need about 20 wind towers, even if they were 100 per cent reliable. But, because they are not, you are going to need in the vicinity of 60 wind towers and more—in fact, some reports talk about hundreds—to take the place of one small modular reactor.

The NuScale reactor is 20 metres high and 2.7 metres wide. The Rolls Royce one is 16 metres high and 4.5 metres wide. They come in on the back of a truck and, when they are removed, they are moved out on the back of a truck.

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