Andrew Charlton (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

CHARLTON () (): The member for Wide Bay has raised a range of issues associated with the rollout of renewable energy across Australia—a rollout which is critical for our nation's ability to meet the challenge of the future to address climate change through an energy transition. He talked about land use, intermittency and habitat impacts, but the question here isn't whether the energy transition is hard or not. We all know the energy transition will be one of the greatest economic challenges we face. The question is: what is the alternative to that energy transition?

The thing that we know is that the alternative, of not doing anything, will be a disaster. It will condemn future generations to unpredictable and devastating weather that will significantly infringe on our way of life. To get up in this place and complain about the impacts of renewable energy without proposing an alternative shows the essential core of the Liberal and National Party, which is nothing more than rank climate scepticism.

We have had this for decades—decades of making the perfect the enemy of the good, decades of complaints about the renewable energy transition which ultimately end up in inaction. We had it from Tony Abbott, who in 2009 called the science of climate change 'absolute crap'. In 2017 he referred to renewables like solar and wind as 'intermittent and unreliable power', and now his most recent venture has been to join a climate-sceptic think tank in the UK. Even Malcolm Turnbull was unable to deliver climate change action through his leadership of the Liberal Party. In 2009 he said of the Liberal Party: 'They simply do not believe in human-caused global warming.' He tried as Prime Minister to steer his party towards a more serious position on renewables and could not.

This motion here today is exactly the problem. It's exactly why we have had 10 years of denial and delay and it's exactly why Australia is now so far behind in the race towards the energy transition and the industries of the future. People who fundamentally don't believe in climate change fall over at the first hurdle of difficulty. Whether it be solving how we manage the energy transition while maximising land use or whether it be finding solutions to the problem of intermittency or to preserving habitats, the opposition fall over at the first hurdle for the simple reason that they do not believe in climate change and do not accept its impacts.

Even the member for Cook, when he was Prime Minister, stood in front of the world at COP26 and declared that the government was acting on climate change 'the Australian way'. The so-called Australian way has, for the last decade, seen four gigawatts of dispatchable power leave the grid and only one gigawatt replace it. That's not the Australian way; that's capitulation. That's a decade of inaction and incompetence by a government that never took climate change and renewable energy seriously.

You don't need to look any further than the member for Hume—the former Minister for Energy and Emissions Reduction—who advocated against emissions reduction. This is what the member for Hume had to say in 2019. He wrote in the Financial Review:

The energy sector, in particular, now has a choice. Should CEOs capitulate to the demands from the green left to prematurely close down coal and gas generators, without regard for customers? Or should they focus more on those quiet Australians in the suburbs and regions, the small businesses they run and the industries they work for?

The member for Hume didn't do anything about our energy transition. He oversaw energy capacity leaving Australia's grid. That's fundamentally because he represents a party that doesn't believe in climate change and will therefore always fall over at the first hurdle.

The Leader of the Opposition—this is the man who joked about rising sea levels in the Pacific—now wants to be taken seriously on climate change, and his solution, instead of renewables, is nuclear energy. Well, I'm really looking forward to him travelling the nation and explaining that to communities—not about the habitat destruction or land use issues raised by the member for Wide Bay; I'm really looking forward to him explaining that he's going to save that land but put a nuclear reactor in the backyard. That's a conversation we're willing to have. (Time expired)

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