Dan Tehan (Wannon, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Immigration and Citizenship) Share this | Hansard source

The Albanese Labor government is making a complete and utter mess of the energy transition that this nation is undertaking, and it is the Australian people who are going to pay as a consequence. There is no plan to their transition, and I support the shadow minister for climate change and energy, who's here with us today, in calling that out in this motion. They have no plan for energy. It's not only no plan for energy but also it's no plan with a broken promise, a clear and utter broken promise. Your power bill was meant to go down by $275. Now the Australian people will be lucky if their power bill doesn't go up by more than $1,000 under this government. It is a clear and utter breach of an election commitment, and they have no plan—no plan whatsoever—to fix it. We see what is happening with base-load power in this country. It is shutting down, and there is nothing to replace it with. That is what a transition is all about. There is nothing to replace it with, and worse, it is ideologically driven. It is not technology agnostic; it is ideologically driven. Do you know the worst thing about it?

And I get interjections from the other side. The worst thing about it is they want others to pay the cost for their ideologically driven approach. And people are paying the cost. As I've mentioned, they're paying the cost through their energy bills. But they're also paying the cost because industry are facing higher electricity costs and higher gas costs, and that means that their financial pressures are getting harder and harder. So we're seeing that it's not only households but businesses that are paying the costs. Not only that, it is also rural and regional Australia. I point you to my electorate, where now we are seeing wind companies coming in without even bothering to consult local communities and planning wind farms.

I hear an 'ohh' from the other side. Could you imagine having someone come in to your community and say to you, 'We are going to do this, and we don't care whether you like it or not'—trying to do it without a social licence? I get people shaking their heads, but could you imagine a city electorate where someone came in and said, 'Oh, we want to put a 30-storey building in your suburb.' How do you think that would go down? People would riot. We now have people coming in trying to do this.

It's not only the fact that there is no consultation with local communities; it's worse than that. There is no benefit that accrues to local communities. Moyne shire, in my electorate, probably hosts more wind farms than any other shire in the country. Do you know that not one household has benefited as a result of cheaper electricity, even though they probably host more wind farms than anywhere in the country? How is that fair? We have a wind farm at the moment where the consultation of the proposal has been so poor that we have local Indigenous leaders saying: 'Where is the consultation?' Why isn't the company coming to us and saying: 'Where is the social licence for what you're doing? How can we do it?' None of this is occurring. Not only that—not only are we seeing the wind projects going in and industrialising the landscape—there are transmission lines going in as well, which is making a bad situation worse. People in the cities can shake their heads, but just imagine if high-rise developments were going into your suburbs— (Time expired)

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