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

It's wonderful to look back and realise that I said that, if you free-market the electricity industry, then you will skyrocket the price of electricity. One of our members of parliament in the political party I belong to, the KAP, never gives a speech where he doesn't say that Peter Beattie said that, if we privatise the electricity industry, there will be more competitors and the price will be forced down. When he said this, the price was $674 a year. The price went over $2,000 a year, and now it's over $3,000 a year. Why did it go up to $2,000? The free marketeers tripled the price of electricity in Queensland, and, when they'd finished with us, we had the environmentalists, and they've taken the average price of electricity up another $1,000 a year.

There are people in this place that argue that solar power is cheap and, actually, it is. In fact, I might even say that it's very cheap. But, because there's no-one buying the grid system power—coal-fired power—during the day, in order to keep the power stations open, they've got to increase dramatically the price of their power because otherwise they'd simply have to close the power station. I don't know if anyone in this place actually thinks about the country or about our society, but both sides have said that affordability is the big question. You talk of affordability, and you're going to abolish the coal-fired power industry. All I can say to you is that you will increase by another $1,000 a year the price to consumers. My street in Charters Towers is a very good example. There is only one house out of the 23 houses in the street that has solar panels, and that is the house of the only rich people in the street. All of the rest of the people on the street are on moderate incomes or are retired pensioners. Not one of them has solar panels on the roof. The only rich people in the street are the only people with solar panels. So the poor people are paying three times as much for their electricity to subsidise the rich people. The rich people on our street happen to be me and my wife. My wife is the rich one, not me. We have now taken ourselves into a situation where the poor are subsidising the rich. Infinitely worse is that the government are imposing cost structures upon industry. The Safeguard Mechanism (Crediting) Amendment Bill 2022 imposes those cost structures.

In dog-eat-dog international trade is where the rubber meets the road. If you can't compete, then you'll become a Third World country. We still describe ourselves as an advanced industrial country. Well, someone else can decide about 'advanced', but one thing that we're most certainly not is an industrial country. We're even a mining country. Mining is when you dig out of the ground and sell a metal. We dig out of the ground and sell the ground. That's called quarrying, so we're a quarrying country—the most primitive of activities is left to the Australian people.

There is no doubt in my mind—and I want to put this on the public record by saying it in the House now—that by imposing these costs upon industry in Australia you will lose the steel industry, the aluminium industry and maybe even the copper industry. They will all be gone. So what do you have left of industrialisation? When I went into parliament some 50 years ago and when I went into the ministry 40 years ago, all of your household appliances were made in Australia. Your car was made in Australia—72 per cent of cars were made in Australia. All of your petrol was made in Australia. Now, none of the household appliances are made in Australia, none of the cars are made in Australia and none of the petrol is made in Australia. If you want to buy everything from overseas, that's fine; that's your choice. But you've got to sell something, and we have nothing to sell.

When Jan Carstensz wrote a report on northern Queensland for the governor of Batavia, he said that the place was inhabited by people who didn't wear much clothing, spent all their time on their beaches, didn't appear to do much work and produced nothing of value to the rest of the world. When I quote this, I'm constantly regaled by people laughing and saying, 'So what's changed?' But—like the last bit—we don't produce anything of interest to the rest of the world, except iron ore and coal. So you take out the coal.

Let me be very specific. The last time I looked at the figures, there were only three export items: coal, iron ore and gas. The gas was given away, so we get nothing out of the gas. I'll quantify that: we get $600 million out of the gas. Qatar produce and export the same amount of gas, and they get $29 billion. We pay $49 for a unit of gas when—the fertiliser plant in Mount Isa's paying that sort of figure, I would imagine; that's the cost of gas in Australia—in America, they're paying $6. There are people in America paying $4 a unit. How can they possibly compete? The fact is, they can't, so they, like everything else, are doomed to fail, and they're doomed to fail because you're handicapping the horse with weight that it simply can't carry and be competitive in the race. Here, tonight, we are putting yet another huge burden in the saddle pack of our horses that we bet on and we depend upon for our income. If you want to keep the hospitals open, then you've got to earn money. If you close the coalmines in Queensland, you close the hospitals, because there's no way there will be enough money to keep them open.

In conclusion, China is building our solar panels. They're building 200 coal-fired power stations. Whilst they send all the solar panels to the morons in Australia, they in fact are going into coal. You've got to say, 'Well, who's smart here, China or Australia?' I know where I'll be putting my money on that one. Not only are we going to be priced out of the world market; we are not going to have enough electricity to switch the lights on. That's not my comment; it's AEMO's comment, and they're dead right—8,000 megawatts are going offline over the next four or five years as the coal-fired power stations close. Congratulations to you all for closing the power stations, but there's a little problem: you can't switch the lights on because there are only 2,000 megawatts coming on from Snowy 2.0.

The crossbenchers have done a wonderful job here, and I'm very proud to be one of them. We're talking about transportation, and we can lower our emissions footprint, I think, by about 23 per cent if we proceed down the pathway that we're proceeding down. So don't turn the lights off and don't cost us out of the world market. The patron saint of greenies, Al Gore, in his book said his first solution was ethanol. Have a look at the world map of ethanol countries. There are only two countries that have no ethanol: Australia and Africa. That is not including, of course, the oil producing countries; they don't have ethanol. But all the rest of the world—except for that very small number of countries that are the oil producers—is on ethanol. It's the first solution, and it's the easy thing to do. Of our total exports of $400 billion, instead of sending $40 billion overseas every year to buy fuel we can produce it here in Australia ourselves, so the $40,000 million goes into Australian pockets and not overseas. In the meantime we are going to cut emissions by 23 per cent, yet after all the pain you have inflicted upon the people of Australia you have got to 16 per cent over 12 years. There are poor people on my street that are paying three times more for their electricity than they should be when the rich people are laughing because they've got solar panels on the roof.

There is no fairness, no justice, no intelligence, no good sense, and there will be a day of reckoning for the people in this place. If you, Deputy Speaker Goodenough, and the major parties can't see it coming, just look at the political reality: more than one in three people voted against you at the last election. Neither of you got more than one in three, but we, the people on the crossbenches, got more than one in three. They're trying to tell you something. Even the most avowed anti-Green such as myself has always said we need a pullback on the CO2. Even before it became popular, when I was still in the state parliament, I said, 'When you've got something increasing at an increasing rate, there is a problem.' Where I come from we use the expression 'you take a bit of a pull on the reins'. As far as I'm concerned you've taken no pull off the reins but you've shot the horse out from under you completely.

Let me be very specific: 8,000 megawatts are vanishing. Eraring and five other major power stations in Australia have announced their closure over the next five years. In that same period of time, the much maligned Malcolm Turnbull, and I'm most certainly no fan of Malcolm Turnbull, I can assure you—I'm sorry about this, fellas, but he goes down in the history books because he is the only one who has increased our ability to be able to produce electricity, with the Snowy 2.0. There are 2,000 megawatts coming on from Snowy 2.0 and 8,000 megawatts going off, and AEMO has told you that you won't have any power. Even if you want to build a coal-fired power station now, even if you want to do that, there's a nine- or 10-year wait time. So already you are in a situation where you can't supply the electricity. Instead of moving at 100 miles an hour to fix the problem you're going to close more coal-fired power stations.

I wish someone here followed science. I wish people here just understood what the hell they're talking about. Don't live in a fairytale fantasy land of the latest fashion ideology, of saving the globe and saving the planet and all those sorts of things. Live in reality land, where there is a problem, and an increasingly worsening problem, with CO2. I don't go along with climate change, but in the oceans a very serious problem arises if you keep pumping CO2 up there. A very serious problem arises in the oceans—speak to the scientists and they'll tell you—so we need to pull back. We can pull back 23 per cent of our emissions by doing what the crossbenchers are advocating in the area of transportation.

Now let me turn back to electricity. I know a lot about it. As I said at the start, I was the first person in Australian history to put in a standalone solar system. I got a lot of fame and fortune out of it. Later on, I was the minister for electricity in Queensland when we had the cheapest electricity in the world by a long way—$674 a year, and it's now over $3,000 a year. Now, this is what you do: you build a 2000-megawatt Heliae algae pond power station. What's that? It's coal fired but you are producing CO2, and CO2 is a magical asset. It can be fed to algae, and the algae will make diesel for you—and I pay a tribute to the minister for the environment, Tanya Plibersek, because she actually knows the names of the algae which you can use to produce diesel fuel or fodder for pigs, chooks, cattle, human beings and fish farms. Algae is a very valuable stockfeed. It can be used either way. (Time expired)

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