Bob Katter (Kennedy, Katter's Australian Party) Share this | Hansard source

I hate to point out to the previous speaker that the opposition now has been in government for 4½ months, so if anyone's entitled to the credit for the glass on the roofs it should be the Liberal Party. I, of course, take the opposite position: they should be condemned for putting the glass on the roofs. There is no-one in this place who knows more about it than I do because I put in the first standalone system in Australia, won the national science prize for that year and also went into detail of producing high-tech silicon here in Australia.

I can tell you that, if you can think you can produce that glass on your roof without producing CO2, you believe in the tooth fairy. To process silicon—and that's even if it's in sand, whereas most of it's in rock form—is enormously costly in terms of CO2. Guess what you smelt silicon with? You smelt it with coal. You burn coal. There's no other way of producing glass than to burn coal. That's a little bit of a lesson there. And who gets the blame? History will decide that.

You are driving us into intermittent power. You are taking away reliable power. I don't know about other people, but I priced a little generator, some batteries and an inverter, because we have already had outages twice in Queensland because Callide B is closing down. They're not going to do any repairs or maintenance on it, and it's constantly dropping out. Five power stations are closing in Australia, taking one-seventh of our base-load power away and replacing it with intermittent power.

That's not the worst of it. I find myself going along to greenie meetings. The bloke almost died of shock when I turned up at a greenie meeting! They are anti windmills, anti windfarms and anti solar because, to quote the professor who gave the address to over 200 of us, twice, in Cairns: 'What is happening here? Stand back and have a look at what is happening here. What is happening here is our nature wonderland is being replaced with an industrial wasteland.' That is exactly what is occurring.

Of all the people in this House, the one that seems to know most about it is Minister Plibersek. I said that the CO2 goes into ponds to grow algae. CO2 is a product. It's not an emission; it's not a by-product. It's a product. We want to produce as much CO2 as we can possibly humanly produce, and a coal-fired power station is the best way of doing that because that CO2 is the feed for algae. The minister actually knew the name of the algae—which is much more than I knew—you use to produce diesel. It's a different type of algae to produce feedstock for chooks, pigs, cattle, fish farms, whatever. That's the way of the future. I went to Israel, because Mike Kelly, the senior minister in the Rudd government, told me I had to go to Israel. They are making so much money out of the CO2. They're putting into hothouses and they're putting it into ponds to grow algae, and that is where we want to go in Australia.

I just don't understand how people don't understand this. I ask people, 'How often do you clean your windscreen?' and they said, 'Oh, once a week, twice a week.' How often do you clean your solar panels! It's the same thing. You've got to clean the solar panels—our advice was—every nine days. I put the first standalone system in; our advice was that we had to clean them every nine days. No one in Australia cleans their solar panels. Just like your windscreen, if you can't see through it, the sunlight can't get through it. That's apart from any other consideration of putting holes in your roof—you never, ever do that—and putting stuff up there that has to be replaced every 20 years. Jeez Louise, I just don't know where you're going with this.

For relegating the economy of Australia to intermittent power instead of base-load power, truly, future generations will curse you. As a published historian, I'm entitled to say that. I just want to say, on the good things in the budget, the $150 million— (Time expired)

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