Henry Pike (Bowman, Liberal National Party) Share this | Hansard source

Can I start this afternoon by congratulating the previous two speakers on such great contributions to the debate on the Net Zero Economy Authority Bill 2024. The two members represent parts of regional Queensland that are going to be impacted by the government's plans to achieve net zero and meet its ambitious targets over the next few years, and these members understand what the impact of this bill will be on their communities.

I represent a section of bayside Brisbane, Deputy Speaker, that some people wouldn't think of as a natural place to have a lot of people working in fossil fuels within the energy system, but in fact Brisbane is often talked about as being our biggest mining town. There are a lot of people in my electorate who work for companies that undertake these kinds of operations and who will be affected by what the government has planned. I will use an example from my electorate that I think illustrates where the government is trying to go here. It's a cautionary tale, perhaps, that those opposite might be able to look at in thinking about where we don't want to go and how we ensure our money is spent wisely.

In my electorate I've got North Stradbroke Island, which is a great tourism mecca for people not just across South-East Queensland but across all of Australia. But on North Stradbroke Island there was a very strong, thriving sand mining industry for many years, and it became a fashionable thing to talk down the sand mining industry and to talk about its impact on the tourism product of the island. I disagreed. Many of the islanders who worked in the sand mining industry disagreed as well. They liked the jobs that they had on the island. It didn't have a major impact on the tourism product there. People didn't even know it was happening. It was out of sight and out of mind, but it created a lot of jobs and it created a lot of wealth.

The current state Labor government decided to abolish sand mining on North Stradbroke Island, and the pitch to the locals was, 'Don't worry. We're going to invest $20 million in an economic transition strategy. You're not going to lose your high-paying job in sand mining. You're going to be forging a new career in a new industry. You're going to get a great job in the tourism sector or in ecotourism,' or whatever other industry the government dreamt up that would replace their high-paying mining job.

That economic transition strategy started in 2015. The $20 million has all been spent and, really, no-one can point to anything of tangible benefit out of it. There's a lot less employment on the islands, and the tourism industry has actually gone backwards over that period of time. A lot of the islanders just look at that and go, 'We were absolutely sold a pup.' All that money was wasted, and I fear that—as the government introduces this bill and seeks to make this legislation and brings through the details of this bill—we are heading in the same direction but on a much larger scale. This isn't just the microcosm of North Stradbroke Island. This is something that will impact a lot of communities across the length and breadth of Australia, and over a long period of time.

The coalition will be opposing this bill because it is costly, it puts pressure across businesses—not just big businesses but small businesses as well. We consider it a union pushed IR reform masquerading as a bill. It neglects our regions of course, as I've mentioned, and it does not help local workers.

The aspects of the legislation that the government's speakers have highlighted earlier in this debate are that it's going to facilitate new investment in net zero transition, but it does this by duplicating the work of existing agencies. The coalition just can't consider it to be money well spent to be duplicating the work that's already being undertaken by other agencies, both at the federal and the state level.

The second responsibility is assisting the impacted workers in that transition area through energy industry jobs plans. Here, the coalition is concerned that this is masquerading as a solution while really being a union pushed IR bill.

It's costly. Labor, of course, loves wasting money. We saw this with the Voice referendum, which cost us $450 million. I had a chat to our opposition spokesperson on government waste this morning and he outlined some of the great examples that he's compiling of how much this government is wasting, and this is certainly on that list. We saw record spending and inflationary spending in last month's budget. Now we see this with bureaucratic waste.

The government has doubled the authority's budget to nearly $400 million from 2023-24 through to 2026-27 alone, with further funding to cost $1.1 billion over the medium term. The government has failed to justify this spending. They've not detailed what actions the authority would perform that are not already happening. Existing state and federal agencies already do the work that the Net Zero Economy Authority promises to do. The work of existing agencies and mechanisms such as the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, the Australian Renewable Energy Agency and the Major Projects Facilitation Agency will be duplicated under this new agency.

The Clean Energy Finance Corporation's legislated role is 'to facilitate increased flows of finance into the clean energy sector and to facilitate the achievement of Australia's greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets.' The new Net Zero Economy Authority's role is 'to facilitate public and private sector participation and investment in greenhouse gas emissions reduction and net zero transformation initiatives in Australia,' including in new industries. These are almost identical. As Australians struggle with the cost of living, we need a government that will rein in spending. Spending over a billion dollars to change the Net Zero Economy Agency to the Net Zero Economy Authority does not rein that in. It is simply bureaucratic waste and more duplication.

Another factor as to why we are opposing this bill is we're worried about the pressure this will place on business. There's concern about the scope of the legislation, particularly for smaller, dependent employers. The explanatory memorandum provides an example of a local cleaning service with a commercial relationship with a closing generator, classified as a dependent employer. It is not clear what liability or obligations the cleaning service would be expected to adopt under an Energy Industry Jobs Plan. It would be up to the FWC to determine. There are no carveouts or exclusions for small businesses in this legislation. These small businesses are unlikely to have the resources or the capacity to administer the services that are going to be outlined in the bill. It's also unclear whether the plan will apply to any permanent employees of closing or dependent employers, and whether casual employees will also be captured. The change claims to help workers in the regions who lose their jobs through the transition to renewables, but Australia already has a well-established safety net. Under section 2.10 of AEMC's national electricity rules, coal-fired power stations must provide 3½ years notice before being able to close. In many instances of business closure and industry change, especially relating to the closure of coal-fired power stations, our industrial frameworks have already been successful. The bill adds an additional layer of regulation not previously considered by the Fair Work system.

Labor's focus should be dealing with energy costs, high inflation and out-of-control red tape; instead, what this bill does, and what we are, unfortunately, seeing too from this Labor government, is continual failure to address the fundamental realities that are facing Australian businesses. We are seeing insolvencies at record highs and more businesses going offshore. Supporting a small number of big businesses is irresponsible and a slap in the face for small businesses desperately seeking answers from this government to survive, particularly when staring down the barrel of what this transition will mean for them.

The Energy Industry Jobs Plan is disguised to help regions but is really just something that Labor's union friends have been pushing for a while now. The Energy Industry Jobs Plan is bought and paid for by the union movement. The unions want the Net Zero Economy Authority to be legislated because the authority will be able to collect the personal information of employees of coal-fired power stations, from financial records to phone numbers. Indeed, the bill does not even require the relevant employees' consent for the information to be passed from their employer onto the Net Zero Economy Authority and the legally mandated trade union representative on its board. This is a gross violation of privacy that Labor's union friends have crafted into this legislation, and I think most Australian workers would be shocked if they read the details of that understood the implications.

The bill also doesn't do enough to care about our regions. We saw this in my electorate where Labor ignored the unique needs of my Bay Islands and denied them eligibility to our Growing Regions Program funds. But my seat is only slightly regional; the impacts on some of these bigger regions are going to be significantly worse. The bill claims to protect regional jobs, but with a lack of detail that delivers no guarantees for local workers and adds pressure to businesses without any guarantee of the types of employment that workers may transition into. This is the promise that was made to the constituents of mine on North Stradbroke Island—they were promised that they were going to be given much-better-paid jobs, greater tenure moving forward and nothing to worry about regarding the closure of their industry. Well, today, they look back and think about the golden times that they enjoyed when that industry was thriving on the islands.

Furthermore, a national agency to assist regions is also duplicative of state-based mechanisms designed to achieve the same outcome. For example, regional planning initiatives already exist through the New South Wales government's Hunter Regional Plan and the Victorian government's Latrobe Valley Authority transition plan.

This new authority would also cut across the work and vision of existing Regional Development Australia committees, which are undertaking a lot of this work and which also recognise that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to create vibrant regions across our country. The challenges will be quite unique. They'll be unique to western areas of New South Wales compared to some of the coalmining areas in the Hunter Valley and up in Gladstone. And, of course, there are the broader challenges across all the different and varied regions of our country. We see this with plans that failed to deliver; a one-size-fits-all approach is certainly not going to work across such a broad country. A national body risks a top-down Canberra-centric approach which does not fully consider regional needs and priorities. The coalition fears this plan is too Canberra-centric, while it pretends to manage the redevelopment of workers in regional coal- and gas-fired power stations.

I'll turn to the recommendations that were made in the dissenting report from the Senate Standing Committee on Finance and Public Administration's considerations of the bill. The coalition members produced a really top-notch dissenting report on this bill and I just encourage the government to consider some of the factors that were highlighted in that report. Of course this is going to pass this chamber—we don't kid ourselves of that—but I do hope that in the fullness of time the government will consider reassessing whether a top-down application is truly the best way to achieve the outcomes they want through this bill. There are also some good recommendations here in relation to how this system, this layer of regulation, has not been fully considered by the Fair Work system. I hope the government does some workarounds there.

The new authority overlaps significantly with existing industrial obligations, including consultation, paid leave, union access and enforcement, without dealing with how these overlapping obligations should interact, and it takes no steps to harmonise measures that will cause confusion, uncertainty and disputation at the workplace level so that it can be avoided. I think that's a critical part of this debate: this will be difficult for business and for employees; why does the government need to make it even more difficult by creating unnecessary confusion and duplication when we can take action now to harmonise these measures? That would ensure there isn't confusion and that there's clear guidance from the federal level which syncs in nicely with the state regulations as well. Why not take the opportunity to do that now before we get down to the business end of the transition? It seems to me that the government has missed a trick in not taking the opportunity while it has presented itself over recent months.

The coalition will be opposing this bill because it is a costly, union-pushed IR reform masquerading as a bill. It puts pressure on small, medium and large businesses. And, most importantly, it neglects our regions and does not help those local workers who are the backbone of the Australian economy and who we should be supporting in this place.

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