David Gillespie (Lyne, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

The National Reconstruction Fund Corporation Bill 2022 is an important bill. It's a no-brainer. We do have to reconstruct our manufacturing capability. It's a matter of national sovereignty and urgency that we rebuild our manufacturing capabilities across a whole range of things. The government are putting up a bill to tip $5 billion in and add another $10 billion, but they have changed the mix of what is going to be supported in the form of either loans, guarantees, equity—all the things that interventionist governments love doing—and a lot of people in business are seeing cheap money. It won't be cheap money if it's borrowed money, where the government has to pay the value of the bonds or the borrowings every year and then try and get money out of their investments or their equity. I certainly agree with the concept that we need to reconstruct manufacturing in this country, expand it. It is value-adding jobs when we use our resources to process them into aluminium, steel, copper—all those things. We are going to process critical minerals for all sorts of things.

The common thread in this is that all these things that you want to do with reconstructing manufacturing won't happen unless we have cheap, available energy all the time. The member for Kennedy has just pointed out the bleeding obvious: countries around the world have spent trillions of their nation's wealth—trillions of euros, trillions of US dollars, trillions of Australian dollars—on the mirage of being able to totally get rid of fossil fuels. I hate to disappoint the member from the crossbench, but fossil fuels are part of the modern industrial world. Coal will be needed to make steel.

You can replace the use of coal and gas to produce electricity, and something that I want to point out to the ministers on the other side is that the investment mandate is critical. If we are going to spend this money, we need to reconstruct our electricity grid, because it's been moth-eaten away and it's about to collapse. The Callide Power Station in Queensland is still not ready to generate electricity. Liddell is about to be destroyed and, in a couple of years time, Eraring will be, and there will be regular blackouts, because there is no reserve capacity left in our grid to keep our cities working. Keeping everything running—hospitals, refrigeration, food processing, sewerage—relies on constant energy in a grid, and our grid has been moth-eaten away. We will end up like South Africa. Trust me, that is coming soon to a city near you, because Liddell has threatened to close. They have put in for approval to basically disassemble it, blow it up and put a battery there. Instead of 51.5 gigawatts of electricity coming out 95 per cent of the time, there will be a 500-megawatt superbattery. That will be chewed up in a couple of minutes.

The other thing is that we should remove the prohibition on nuclear energy, because we know it has the lowest footprint in terms of CO2—lower than wind and solar. I'm not making this up. The United Nations say this. The European Commission for the economy says this. The Nuclear Energy Agency has shown this. There is much less steel, concrete and critical minerals in a nuclear power plant. The waste is very manageable, but we need to remove the prohibition. If we are going to reconstruct our manufacturing, we can have green steel and we can have green aluminium, with nuclear power. Five grams of CO2 per kilowatt—that is lower than wind and solar. There is no destruction of vast parts of the country—our beautiful native forests and mountaintops and plains covered with short-lived renewable energy and mineral-intensive renewable resources. The sun is renewable and the wind is renewable, but solar panels and wind farms are very short lived. So put the money into reconstructing our grid and manufacturing; we'll get cheap energy and will thrive again.

See this speech in context