Rowan Ramsey (Grey, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

On Saturday, I was travelling north, and a friend rang me up. He employs about 90 people. No, he's not a big-business man; he's a medium-business man. He's not the kind of businessman that those on the other side hang around with. He isn't Lindsay Fox or Twiggy Forrest. He only employs 90 people. But I'll tell you what, he does a pretty good job with those 90 people and he provides a great service to Australia. He said: 'Why is it? Why do governments hate people like me? Why do they keep loading me up with extra rigmarole, with red tape and with things I've got to fill out to justify the things that I've always done right? What is it they've got against us?' I find myself here today rising to speak on yet another one.

The Net Zero Economy Authority is another quango. It's another semi-government, at-arms-length body that will make life more difficult for those who create wealth in this country. These bodies are a way for governments to hide from their responsibility. If you want any proof of that, you only need to look at this chamber this week, where the minister for immigration has been hiding behind the Administrative Appeals Tribunal. 'It's not me! It's this body over here. It's this semi-independent body that we fund and I give the writing rules to. And they were only implementing the rules that I told them to implement. How could it possibly be my fault?' That's what happens with these bodies. This is a conversation I've had with my wife many times. Why on earth do governments keep divorcing themselves from the responsibilities that the people of Australia elect them to hold by forming new quasi-government bodies to get in the road.

Consider small business and the impositions that this government has already put on them. Have a look at the IR legislation, the casual conversion, the paid domestic violence leave—I said at the time that I wasn't against paid domestic violence leave; I was against the fact that companies and employers had to pay for it—more power for the Fair Work Commission, the right to disconnect and increased union access. Of course, now we've got the proposal for eight weeks of half-paid leave, which will leave huge holes in the workforce. Then we've got the safeguard mechanism. That's aimed at bigger business. This is about putting the pressure cooker on businesses over the next 30 years to get to zero emissions. Funny thing—that's what we're talking about at the moment. That is another stick already on the shelf that is belting businesses to say: 'This is what you have to do. If you can't meet these targets, then you're going to have to buy them off other people.'

Now we've got the scope 3 emissions raising their ugly head. That will flow down to smaller and medium-sized businesses. For them to meet their obligations, they will have to start putting the squeeze on their tertiary customers. The very small businesses will then have to employ accountants to work out what it is they are emitting and how they can meet those targets for the next people up the food chain. Just as a point of interest, because we've been talking about immigration in this place a lot lately, there were 4,000 accountants brought into Australia last year. I'll tell you what, Mr Deputy Speaker Buchholz? If all this stuff gets up, we'll need 40,000 for those small businesses to actually deal with what's coming down the pipeline at them.

So now we're getting the National Zero Economy Authority. I'll read this from the government's notes. It's intended to be a 'shopfront for industry and investors'. It will seek to 'work with project proponents, state governments and others to get projects to investment decision'. The authority will mobilise public moneys through vehicles like the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and the National Reconstruction Fund.

But, hang on! Isn't that what the Clean Energy Finance Corporation already does? On their website, they say their job is:

To facilitate increased flows of finance into the clean energy sector and to facilitate the achievement of Australia's greenhouse … targets.

Just in case you were thinking: 'Well, at least they are targeting private investment,' I can tell you that they distributed $30 billion of taxpayers' hard-earned money to reach that objective, and now they've got the Net Zero Economy Authority, which is going to assist them to do exactly what they were created to do. That's a handy thing to do in meeting that national greenhouse target!

Then we've got ARENA. Their job's pretty much the same thing as well, except they've got $16.2 billion over 10 years. Here we are with another organisation that is shovelling taxpayer subsidy to support what we are told is the cheapest form of energy. It really does test the imagination. If it's the cheapest form of energy, why on earth does it need to keep having all this money shuffled in its direction?

Before those over there start saying I'm a climate denier or whatever, I will say that I'm a great supporter of renewable energy. I'd love to get some of those wind farms on my property. They're worth about $15,000 or $20,000 a pop, and if I could host 10 or 20 of those—in fact, I've probably got enough room for a hundred of them, quite frankly—I'd be quite happy to do so.

But it's worth remembering that those wind farms are being built on another subsidy again, and this is a hidden one. This is one you can't see. This is a consumer subsidy. Consumers' retail bills are jacked up to pay the LRET and, now, the new government subsidy for construction of new generation. The retail part of your bill is jacked up, but you can't read it—it's not in there—so, when you compare the wholesale prices at any given moment of the day with your prices, you can't work out why on earth there's such a mark-up. One of the reasons for the mark-up is the hidden subsidies that have been built into that program.

In large, this new authority is just providing more red tape for Australia and duplicating jobs that are already being done by other government agencies. I just can't see how it contributes to national wealth or progress.

I've been a student of the national grid since the closure of the Northern Power Station at Port Augusta was proposed over a decade ago. I don't know whether you or anyone else in the chamber has this but I have a pocket NEM on my phone. It allows me to chip in there at any time of the day and have a look at what wholesale prices are doing. I noticed only last week that there was a warning from AEMO that said that the national grid—this is the eastern grid—was looking at the possibility of blackouts in coming summers.

I know that one of the most fragile parts of the year is autumn. I've been watching that pocket NEM pretty closely and seen that there have been many days when the wind is virtually not contributing at all to the network. I was writing something the other night and I flicked open my phone and had a look at the NEM. I know that South Australia has 2,742 megawatts of installed capacity of renewables. We were consuming around 1,800 megawatts at the time, but the renewables were generating 56—that's 56 out of 1,800, or three per cent of the demand, or about 1½ per cent of their full capacity—because there was no wind and it was dark. I don't know if you know about these meteorological things, Mr Deputy Speaker Buchholz, but if it's dark you don't get solar power. Now, that's not unusual.

We're told that batteries will fix this, and we've had some big investments in batteries in South Australia. They were contributing five gigawatts. Do you know why they were contributing five megawatts? It was because it had been calm for days, and the batteries were exhausted. This is not unexpected. It is not irregular. It happens at this time of year quite regularly. So we were keeping our lights on in South Australia by importing another 554 megawatts over the border from Victoria. I thought: 'That's pretty good. Perhaps I'll have a look at Victoria.' Well, they had the same problem. They had a bit more breeze over there—they were getting nine per cent of their electricity from their renewables and, to be fair, another eight per cent from their hydro facilities. But of course they are existing, old-money facilities that can't be expanded, so I think you can discount them largely. So 77 per cent of their load was coming from coal and gas.

It brings you to this question: what on earth are we going to do in the longer term about bridging this gap if we are to get to net zero by 2050? It's worth pointing out that in South Australia we lead the nation on renewables—71.5 per cent of our electricity over the last 12 months came from renewables. That's pretty impressive, I'd have to say. The next best is Victoria, with 36.8 per cent. So we're leading the race in South Australia, but it's not the only race we're winning. We're also winning the race to the highest average retail prices. According to Canstar Blue—and I'm told they are about the most reliable averager of these prices—we're paying 45.3c for a kilowatt hour in South Australia. The next highest is New South Wales, at 33.84c. For the record, Victoria is 30.42c. So South Australia has twice as much renewable energy as Victoria, per capita, and we pay 30 per cent more—for the cheapest form of energy in the world!

How on earth can this be? It takes a bit of getting your head around. But the answer lies in the fact that it's not available all the time, and the more you squeeze your reliable generators, your dispatchable generators, the baseload generators—they needn't be baseload; they could be gas peakers as well, but the more you squeeze them—and put them out of business because they can sell on fewer and fewer hours or days a year when they can make a profit, the more of them drop out, or you don't get reinvestment, and they wear out. The fact that you need them for fewer days a year only amplifies the fact that you need them ever more for the days of the year when you can't generate enough electricity out of the network.

The idea that Australia's power services can just go down and go black and we can have a blackout for a few days is just not entertainable in the modern world. We have to be much better than that. While those opposite will throw rocks at the proposal of nuclear energy—and that's all it is, a proposal—let's get the ban off talking about it. Let's get the ban off consideration. I'm not welded to nuclear. I think it's a good idea, and so do 16 other of the top 20 economies in the world. We are No. 13 on gross domestic product output in the world. There is one country above us, Germany, that does not have nuclear power. They decommissioned theirs three years ago. There are three countries below us that do not have nuclear power, and they're all building nuclear power. So we and Germany are the only ones that won't have nuclear power in five or 10 years time, or whenever it is that they come online.

Anyway, if it's not to be nuclear, what is it that is going to fill this gap that I can predict will happen pretty much in March, April and May every year because we are in that period of the year when it doesn't blow, and at night-time, surprisingly enough, the sun is not shining? What is it that's going to fill that gap? It's not going to be coal or gas, because no organisation in their right mind would build a new coal- or gas-fired power station in Australia while they've got a government that is completely hostile to them. These are long-time intergenerational, inter-decade investments. They need to have surety if they are to invest. The government underwrites new renewable energy but the government is not prepared to underwrite new fossil fuel industry or new dispatchable industry that is not renewable.

I'm open to anything that comes along technologically that can fill this gap. Batteries are part of it. The point I made when I was reading out those numbers is that once you get enough calm days, your batteries haven't got any kick in them either. So it doesn't matter what it is, you need to build an alternative power system capable of standing on its own two legs for basically weeks at a time, with very little renewable energy flowing into it, to sustain the electrical grid of Australia.

I'm out of options. I just go, 'What the hell is it?' If it's not going to be gas, it's not going to be coal and it's not going to be nuclear, what is it? Whatever it is hasn't been invented yet. So I'm concerned that there is so much energy being focused on what seems to be a goal that has a set of barriers placed around it that make it unachievable. If we want to get to net zero by 2050—and that's what this whole new organisation is about—we've got to get the regulation of it so we can do so.

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