Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

I don't accept what the Leader of the Opposition has just said about the energy regulator. Indeed, AEMO, in a statement on 25 January, said this:

Record generation from grid-scale renewables and rooftop solar is triggering wholesale energy prices and greenhouse emissions to fall …

That's actually what they said.

The Leader of the Opposition asked me about, as he characterises it, a renewables-only approach. I say it is the market-led approach that leads you to the cheapest form of new energy, which is renewables. When we talk about the approaches that are there, we could take an approach that they have taken—the nuclear road. The Leader of the Opposition has said that that is where they want to go, down that road, in contravention of where the market will take us. He says that once they fix four outstanding issues—safety, disposal, cost and location—then they'll be right down that road. But the shadow minister came up with less impediments than the leader, to be fair; he says there are only three issues that they need to solve—technical feasibility, financial feasibility and community acceptability. Apart from that, it's all good!

Now, the climate is changing but the Liberal Party never will. We saw it on Nemesis; the now Leader of the Opposition used the National Energy Guarantee put forward by the former shadow Treasurer to try and take the leadership and the prime ministership—not through a vote of the people but through the backing of the hard right of the Liberal Party.

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