Chris Bowen (McMahon, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Climate Change and Energy) Share this | Hansard source

The honourable member for Newcastle asked me in part about working with members of parliament, and she's a terrific one—an absolutely terrific one. Working with the states and territories is important as well. Our cooperation with states and territories is one of the reasons we saw a record 5.9 gigawatts of renewable energy installed into the grid last year. It's also one of the reasons the Investor Group on Climate Change today released figures showing that those investors citing regulatory uncertainty as a barrier to investment have dropped by 30 percentage points since we came to office. That's cooperation with the states and territories.

The same report showed that, out of 14 options for investing in energy in Australia, the most popular for investors was renewable energy and the least popular was nuclear energy. The report said: 'This is due to nuclear energy's very high cost and lack of maturity and deployment in next-generation technologies.'

I was asked by the honourable member for Newcastle about approaches that have been proposed. Of course, we know that those opposite proposed nuclear. The Leader of the Opposition said last week to his party room there were four problems: cost, safety, disposal and location. We've just added a fifth, which is lack of investor certainty and lack of investor interest. I can add a sixth, which is the states.

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