Josh Burns (Macnamara, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The Nationals kept their seats, as the member for New England rightly points out. But the member for New England made it very difficult for campaigning in Higgins, Bennelong, Reid, Goldstein, Kooyong, North Sydney, Mackellar, Wentworth and all the other seats they no longer hold, because of the attitudes of he and his friends in the National Party. They are going down this ridiculous path of having an ideological war against the cheapest form of energy. They are against the cheapest form of energy because that is what the National Party stands for. They are ideologically opposed to renewables; it is in their DNA. The member for New England has fought against renewables his entire career and, to give him credit, he's consistent. He has fought against renewables his entire career, and that's what the National Party are all about.

But the Liberal Party is disintegrating because, obviously, there are people in Australia who understand that renewables are the cheapest form of energy. Our energy grid is changing as the coal-fired power stations come out of the grid. We're not going to replace them with the most expensive form of energy. We're going to replace them with a cheaper form of energy so that Australians in a cost-of-living crisis can actually have some cheaper form of energy. Now, as the new energy comes on to the grid, that's a process that needs to be managed respectfully and appropriately. But we are absolutely proud of the fact that, over the next 10 years, we are going to transform our grid into a renewable energy grid, because it is going to be better and cheaper for Australians. We have a coastline that is larger than any other country in the world and we have a desert the size of the Sahara. It is insane that, for the last 10 years, the previous government was fighting renewable energy every single step of the way. You have to ask yourself: if these people opposite are so hell-bent on stopping renewable energy and stopping the new cheaper forms of energy, what are they going to do instead?

You only have to listen to them when they tell us exactly what they want to do—it's nuclear energy. Time and time again, we've gone through this tiresome debate about how long it would take to build a large-scale reactor. Well, fine, they've now ruled out the fact that they're not going to build a large-scale reactor; they want to build a small modular reactor. The only problem is: give me one example in the world where there is a modular reactor that is ready to go—being built, that hasn't pushed out time lines—that's actually being rolled out around the world. The amount of energy that you're going to need to power our country via small modular reactors is the equivalent of around 80 small modular reactors. So when are you going to tell the Australian people where these 80 modular reactors are going to go? Are they going to go in all the Liberal seats that you've lost because you keep up this insane ranting about renewable energy? Or are they going to go in the National seats that you haven't been honest about? Where are those nuclear energy power plants going to go?

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