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

This gives me, unfortunately, a sober view of how disconnected this parliament has become from the cost-of-living pressures that are now so apparent on so many people—whether they are in Coles with their shopping trolley, whether they are trying to pay their power bills, whether they are trying to pay for their fuel. Underpinning that is a whole range of climate policy issues that are driving it. We have got to move away from the mythology that, somehow, renewables are making power cheaper. It has never been dearer.

We are also seeing going hand in glove with the sentiment of the Safeguard Mechanism (Crediting) Amendment Bill 2022, and the safeguard mechanism and further taxes on the last remaining industries such as the last two oil refineries in Australia, that we are going further and further to a position that says the zealotry and religion of this building—which has trouble trying to change a flag!—can somehow change the temperature of the globe. We have to realise that we have to start putting the mother pushing the shopping trolley first. We have to start understanding that the family that can't pay their power bill comes first. We have to understand that the people who are struggling with their petrol and their fuel come first. This form of zealotry just goes to show you the disconnect that says, 'No, what actually comes first in this parliament is our belief that we are somehow going to single-handedly, by legislation, in Australia, with 1.2 per cent of emissions, change the temperature of the globe.' I'll tell you what you're going to do: you're most definitely going to change the temperature of their wallet, and it's going to become a cold and miserable place.

We have seen with this safeguard mechanism—we are talking about AUKUS. The government want net zero by 2050, which—surprise, surprise!—is around the time of the culmination of AUKUS. And what does AUKUS need? I presume it's going to need Australian steel. BlueScope will be taxed. The people driving to work will be taxed because there'll be a new tax on fuel. The gas that's required will be taxed for new gas production. The coal that is used for electricity is taxed. We say we must have a strong defence platform—and we must—but to support it, to pay for it, our nation needs to be as strong as possible as quickly as possible across every field. If it's important enough to spend $360 billion-plus on submarines, then it's important enough to have a more sober, clinical realisation of where we are in manufacturing and across myriad fields, and understand that, if we come forward and say the way we are going to help these people is by creating a new form of carbon tax, we're working at conflicting purposes. To encourage people to set up in this nation we must have the cheapest power. We don't have the cheapest wages and we don't want the cheapest wages. Global commodities place a price on a global mechanism. We used to have a strategic advantage. We used to have the cheapest power and now we don't. Unless we get back there then the mythical belief that we'll somehow have manufacturing jobs pour into Australia, when manufacturing can be done so much cheaper somewhere else, is just that: it's a myth.

We know that with the Labor Party it's coming unstuck. I had a ministerial visit last week. I never got a phone call in my office. I wanted one. It wasn't in the paper that the person was coming. This person did the best impersonation of a nuclear submarine I've seen yet. He just popped up and nobody knew he was there. It was Minister Bowen. He surfaced at Uralla—he just popped up. It was terrifying. No-one knew he was turning up. If they had known he was turning up, by gosh he would have got a welcoming party. The new transparency in government is the Chris Bowen nuclear submarine. You never know; he could turn up in Rockhampton. Be careful—he's very dangerous. He went up there so he could talk to a small group of people who were onside with him. There are a vast group of people who don't want transmission lines across their country and who don't want to be inside wind factories. We'll have more structures around the town of Walgett—with about 2,000 people—of over 260 metres high than the CBD of Sydney. That is an absurdity. Where people get it wrong is when they say, 'Oh, there'll be all these jobs.' They're contractors: they fly in and they fly out.

Another thing we realised is that, if you are going to put in a new coalmine, you have to put money in a trust for the decommissioning and rehabilitation of the site—you have to. If you put in any mine, you have to provide for the rehabilitation of the site. You can't get the DA through without it. But, with these wind factories, you don't need to do that. They just stand there and when they become obsolete—and, by gosh, they do; the first towers were three megawatt towers and now they're building 7½ megawatt towers—the cost of pulling down a tower is vastly higher than the cost of putting it up. So what do they do with them? They leave them there. They leave them there because—this is the trick—the farmer's responsible for them. They get paid the $30,000 a year per tower because they're responsible for them. Of course they don't have the $750,000 per tower to decommission them. This is going to be a blight on the landscape.

Now we go to the next section of this thing—the safeguard mechanism. They're going to fix the problem by bringing in a new tax on the industries we already have, and there is the solution of the Labor Party. When you bring up other zero emission technology solutions, such as small modular reactors and nuclear power, they say: 'No, we can't have that. We can't have those manufacturing jobs. We can't have that technology.' Hang on, but you support nuclear submarines, and they've got small modular reactors in them with highly enriched uranium. You know something? The uranium they use in those is actually uranium that was going to go into nuclear weapons. That uranium—some of it from decommissioned nuclear weapons—is used in the reactor. It's highly enriched uranium. But that's all right. They can do that, but they can't get their mind around small modular reactors. They say they want to employ thousands of nuclear technicians, who we imagine will predominantly be under the auspices of the Navy. What happens when these people come? Where will they work? Milk bars? Or—I don't know—will they work as farm labourers? If you had small modular reactors and a nuclear industry in South Australia, you'd actually have jobs for them to go to. You'd actually have high-paying manufacturing jobs and the capacity to produce zero emission power. But they won't do it because of the zeitgeist, the religion. Part of that religion, although it's pro zero emissions, is anti nuclear power. The rest of the world, as they always do, leave poor old Australia behind. Rolls-Royce are developing them, Skoda are developing them, Mitsubishi are developing them, General Electric are developing them and Westinghouse are developing them. Scandinavia, England, France, the United States of America, Argentina and Canada are miles ahead, as are China, Russia and even the United Arab Emirates and Czechoslovakia. Minister Bowen, the human nuclear submarine, who pops up silently, never to be known—the man who does the best impression of a rabbit just disappearing down a hole and popping up a hole—laughs. He says the CSIRO has told us we're the only smart ones. All those other countries are so silly. The only clever one, the only child who's walking in step, is Mr Bowen. All the rest are out of step. We should ring up Rolls-Royce, Skoda and Hitachi and say, 'Stop this. We've heard Mr Bowen. It doesn't work.'

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