Luke Howarth (Petrie, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

This bill, the Net Zero Economy Authority Bill 2024, is fundamentally a bureaucratic waste that imposes a harsh new series of obligations on small, medium and large businesses. The Albanese Labor government's ideological obsession with top-down, Canberra centric approaches is going to cost taxpayers some $1.1 billion over the medium term, with this bill.

The bill is nothing more than another industrial relations bill to serve Labor's union donors, disguised as a bill for the regions. The authority explicitly has responsibility for facilitating public and private sector participation, investment in greenhouse gas emissions, and reduction and net zero transformation initiatives in Australia, including in new industries. This provision is almost copied and pasted from the Clean Energy Finance Corporation's legislated role 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 level of duplication between the proposed Net Zero Economy Authority's responsibility to promote new investment in the net zero transition and existing Commonwealth entities is another example of this government's obsession with red tape and union agendas. How many federal agencies tasked with renewable financing does the Commonwealth require? We've got this one which is being set up. We've got the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, the Australian Renewable Energy Agency and Labor's Rewiring the Nation program. Adding all this up, it's billions of dollars.

We know what this will do to local economies, particularly in regional seats which currently have gas and coal closures and which currently have power stations. In a regional centre, what exactly will happen to that economy? It's not just the workers in those power stations that will disappear; it's all the small and family businesses associated in that local region. It might be the local butcher supplying fresh meat from farms in the area. It might be local advertising companies, sign-writers and so forth, who write the signs for the local butchers and other small businesses in the area. If the workers disappear, what happens to the local hairdressers and barbers, and the local cleaning companies that go in and clean where these workers are going from or who clean the toilets and the lunchrooms and everything else? There are the local real estate agents as well, who sell properties in the area or lease them to new people coming in. Prior to coming into this place, I used to run a pest control business. What happens to local pest controllers, who make sure the place isn't overrun with cockies and rats and everything else? None of them get anything in this. There are the local pubs and local cafes, the people supplying lunches and coffees in the morning, and the volunteer organisations that look after the families who are involved in the area, maybe at the local church, the local football club or the local Lions Club. As people are taken out of the regions, what happens to all of them? There is nothing in this bill to help them.

Labor's net-zero targets are fundamentally about closing coal and closing gas, and not replacing them with any other baseload energy. They said no to emissions-free modern nuclear power. They want to do everything with solar and wind—all made in China, by the way. The only solar panels made in this country are Tindo Solar. I've got them on my roof. They're $100 more expensive than every other solar panel you can buy. Everything else is made in China. We had the minister in here crowing the other day in question time about all the solar farms that he had rolled out. Once again, not one of those panels is made by Tindo, I can tell you. They're all imported. The Australian people understand that, that you're replacing Australian minerals, coal and gas with Chinese-made solar panels and Chinese-made wind farms that aren't renewable—they've got to be buried. They last 25 years max—possibly 25 years.

The Treasurer delivered a budget the other night, with a big deficit next year—$43 billion—but a small surplus this year built on the back of coal, gas and other mining activities. They're replacing it all with Chinese-made wind farms, and the minister won't consider alternatives. So it is a real concern. We know from the actions already of this government that, once the authority is established, the government will continue to ram new and additional responsibility into this authority to support its net zero climate ambitions.

The union movement wants the Net Zero Economy Authority to be legislated because the authority will be able to collect the personal information of employees at coal-fired power stations, from financial records to phone numbers, and the bill does not even require the relevant employee's consent for their information to be passed from their employer onto the Net Zero Economy Authority. This isn't a bill for Australia; this is a bill for the Albanese Labor government's union donors, as we have often seen in this place over the past couple years with different legislation that has come through. If you look at the biggest expenditure in the budget the other night for the minister for workplace relations, it wasn't even mentioned in his press release after the budget. It was all about another $60 million for the unions. So this is essentially an industrial relations bill disguised as a bill for the regions and transition.

The coalition will oppose this bill due to its bureaucratic waste and duplication and a top-down approach based here in Canberra which is set to fail on delivering on the unique needs of the regions, which I have partly outlined and which other members, particularly Queensland members like the member for Hinkler and the member for Capricornia, have partly outlined as well. We will oppose this bill due to the imposition on family, small, medium and large businesses and the fact that this is another example of Labor's haphazard approach on industry policy which delivers no guarantees for local workers. There is no guarantee here at all.

Under Labor's renewable-only plan, there is a risk of major job losses. Jobs will be lost in mining in the coal and gas sector and in all of those small and medium businesses that I just outlined a moment ago. What are these people going to do when they lose their jobs? They have families. They have mortgages or they pay rent. These people have already been doing it tough under the last couple of years with inflation and cost-of-living increases.

Mark from North Lakes in my electorate asked me these questions just on the weekend. He said, 'What is the current government doing to grow our economy?' It's returning Australian manufacturing locally, but the way I estimate it we have lost 100,000 jobs in manufacturing in the last few years. That's from the horse's mouth. It's from the minister for manufacturing, Minister Husic. He said that there are 900,000 jobs in Australian manufacturing. We know that during COVID there were around a million manufacturing jobs. In the last two years, since Scott Morrison has no longer been Prime Minister, 10 per cent of manufacturing jobs have gone. But, if you listen to the government, they're talking in this bill about everything being Australian made. That's not what's happening in reality.

My constituent also said: 'The current cost of living is out of control. What's the plan for the next six months to lower it? Have they considered lowering the fuel excise or a reduction in interest rates?' This bill is going to add another $1 billion of spending on top of, we estimate, $315 billion in additional spending since the government was elected in the forward estimates over the next four years. If you take the last budget of the Morrison government, $315 billion additional on top of that in the last two years is within the forward estimates. That will add to inflation. Mark asked, 'How is the current government assisting small businesses to remain economically viable instead of charging more tax with fewer deductions and having woke, green incentive deductions which aren't viable for the majority of small businesses?' Mark sums it up well given that we are talking about the Net Zero Economy Authority Bill, which is another $1 billion with nothing for small and family businesses.

John from Griffin said: 'My burning question is: what happens when we reach net zero? Having spent billions of dollars, when will we get a return on investment?' The government often says, 'We are a net zero superpower.' What does that mean? It sounds good. It sounds good in elections—'We are going to be a net-zero, renewable energy superpower.' They are selling off. They are going to close everything down. Everything's going to be made in China. They have some sort of plan—'We are going to make some solar panels here.' It's $100 extra for Tindo panels. Not everyone can afford that, and this minister will not consider modern nuclear power, which is emissions free. We could actually use uranium and so forth that's in the ground here. In the budget they're extending the good work that the member for Hinkler did when he was resources minister of mapping the minerals in the ground throughout Australia. I wonder whether they'll even include uranium in that. I doubt it. That's a good capacity.

The reality is that, if this minister is serious about looking after Australians and is really serious about achieving net zero, he wouldn't just automatically rule out modern nuclear power that has zero emissions, would he? We could actually mine some of the resources for it here to replace the coal and gas that they are closing down. We could build a station where coal and gas is shutting down, and all of those are small and family businesses that I mentioned earlier—from the butchers, the hairdressers and the real estate agents to the pest controllers and the volunteer organisations—would remain viable in the regions, because that's where you'd put the modern nuclear power reactor that has zero emissions.

But, no, we can't do that. Despite the fact that they're continuing on with and have signed up to AUKUS, which Scott Morrison negotiated, and despite the fact that we currently have a nuclear reactor in the middle of Sydney, and have had for 50 years, he won't consider any of that. There are so many people that basically support it, including former prime minister Bob Hawke, Dick Smith and Tony Irwin. He was on 4BC Brisbane the other day, He's a nuclear expert who has worked on eight power stations in Britain with their energy agency.

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