Tony Pasin (Barker, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Infrastructure and Transport) Share this | Hansard source

Every now and then you get an opportunity to reflect on what happens constantly in this place. Increasingly in this place, we get bills whose titles fail to reflect what is actually going on. Rather, they're drafted in a way—the title in particular—that sends some spiffy message out of this place or, equally, they're designed as a wedge. For example, who wouldn't want to vote for the nature positive bill? And, just as a precursor to what may or may not happen in the party room tomorrow, I'm not sure I'm someone who would, but the title of the bill would suggest that you should. We all want to be positive, and we want to be positive about the environment. When I looked at this bill and its title, I thought, 'Maybe some honesty finally from those opposite,' because I read 'net zero economy bill,' and I thought, 'Maybe they're finally being honest about what their ideological pursuit of net zero climate change policy will do to this economy. It will reduce it to zero.' But no, that's not what this bill seeks to do—this bill which, Madam Deputy Speaker, it will come as no surprise to you that the coalition will oppose. This bill doesn't seek to do that. This bill seeks to spend $1.1 billion dollars, that's more money than you can fire a rocket ship over. They are taxpayers dollars, real dollars in the real economy, not in the net zero economy, to effectively push industry—in particular, small, medium, family businesses—into the pursuit of net zero technologies.

As we just heard from the shadow Assistant Treasurer, there's no harm in net zero technologies. The harm is how you get there. This bill seeks to spend $1.1 billion pushing industry in that direction, when what we should be doing is finding ways, through technology or other means, to allow this technology to be demand pulled through rather than, let's call it, regulation pushed. We know it's regulation pushed because this bill calls for the creation of a whole new bureaucracy. The aim of that new bureaucracy it to do the regulation pushing to force industry and business to adopt this approach.

That would be bad enough, if it weren't duplicative, but it's doubly bad because many of these agencies seeking to facilitate the new investment into the net zero transition exist. They exist today. They operate today. But that's not enough for those opposite. Ultimately, there needs to be a new bureaucracy created to do the work that the Clean Energy Finance Corporation is doing today and that the Australian Renewable Energy Agency—ARENA—is doing today. A whole new bureaucracy to do what we're already doing and, worse, to push businesses in this direction, to drive up the costs of doing business, which we all know—those of us who've spent time in the real world—drives up cost-of-living pressures because businesses either fold or drive their prices up. When they fold, often enough they face import competition, meaning consumers are buying goods from other jurisdictions—many of whom, by the way, aren't climate obsessed in the way that the government opposite tends to be.

There are some themes emerging from this government. It's said that when the government changes, the country changes. This is another example of top-down, Canberra-centric decision-making which is purporting to be about the regions. It's said that a lot of this net zero economy will deliver dividends to the regions. That's a very Canberra-centric decision matrix because I've got to tell you that you just need to look at who the people of regional Australia elect and bring to this place. They don't sit, on average, on the seats opposite. They sit over here. They want a practical and sensible approach to environmental policy and they want a practical and sensible approach to energy policy.

The shadow Assistant Treasurer was just pointing out one of the obvious inconsistencies with the thought processes of those opposite, who are strident supporters of AUKUS—as they should be. I congratulate the Prime Minister for his comments today shouting down the Greens and the leader of the Greens, in particular, regarding the very important strategic relationship between our country and the United States of America. Those opposite are happy to see nuclear submarines, Virginia class submarines, at Port Adelaide—I'm a parochial South Australian; sorry about that—and happy to see nuclear energy powering those vessels. They're happy for that technology to be used in submarines, manned by ADF personnel, diving to great depths under the ocean and coming into port at, in South Australia's case, Port Adelaide, a densely populated area. They think that's perfectly safe. But what's not safe, those opposite say, is to have the same technology creating energy on dry land. It's safe to have it in a submarine, but, if the captain of that boat were to get a set of jumper leads to power a coffee van on the wharf, he'd face a term of imprisonment. I mean, seriously! It's little wonder the Australian people are increasingly expressing support for nuclear energy as part of our energy mix.

This isn't the only policy area in which we're seeing Canberra-centric decision-making. Just before question time today I took the opportunity to remind the House that the Australian wine industry is desperate for support. The governments of France and the United States are supporting their wine grape growers. In Bordeaux and the Napa Valley, with the support of government, vineyards are being removed. Why? Because we have fewer wine drinkers globally who are drinking less wine. This is not, as those opposite would like us to believe, an issue of the temporary pause in wine sales into China. It's a product of the global mismatch between demand and supply. But Canberra-centric decision-making says: 'There's nothing to support you as a wine grape grower.'

Another example is that those opposite want to rip water out of the Murray-Darling Basin. That's another Canberra-centric decision. It's certainly not one made in the regions for the regions, as this bill purports to be.

Of course, the greatest example of the disconnect between Canberra based decision-making and the regions is the decision by those opposite to phase out the live sheep trade. This is an industry which has done everything asked of it by government, by regulators, and still it will be abolished in this country. It sounds a significant warning to all agricultural industries: if an industry does everything a government asks of it and still faces being banned from trading, you need to think seriously about the dangerous precedent that sets.

So excuse me if for one moment I highlight the Canberra-centric approach to decision-making which is failing to deliver for regional Australia. Those opposite say that much of the transition to a net zero economy will occur in the regions. It might happen there, but once the wind turbines are built, once our landscape is carpeted with solar panels and forested with wind turbines, the jobs will leave town. I've seen it myself. I've seen it as these satanic mills have rolled out across landscapes. This bill will deliver nothing for the regions. What it will do is impose greater costs, as I said earlier, on small, medium and, indeed, large businesses.

Some people like to laugh that there must be a money tree here in Canberra somewhere. Politicians—treasurers, and perhaps pseudo treasurers aspiring to be assistant treasurers—would like to one day shake that money tree. But no money tree exists, in the same way that industry doesn't benefit from unlimited cash. It turns profits, and it turns profits by selling its goods and services for more than they cost. And if you drive up the cost of delivering or producing the goods and services then, necessarily, they have to cost more.

Those opposite would have to be—have to be!—cognisant of that by now, at least. Let's face it, they spent a good 12 months pontificating about the Voice and spending, as estimates told us last week, what it is estimated to be more than half a billion dollars on that endeavour. At least now I feel confident that most of those opposite have come to the realisation that the cost of living is the No. 1 consideration for Australians from day-to-day and it's the No. 1 issue that they want their government—the government they elected two years ago and trusted to office—to do something about. But this bill does nothing to address that. Quite the opposite; you could make a reasonable case that this bill is purposely directed at driving up the costs of goods and services—most particularly energy, which is sequestered in almost everything, every good, we buy and almost every service we seek. And that impacts us at the supermarket—at the checkout, at the browser and when we sit down once a month or once a fortnight to pay our insurance and to meet our other costs and expenses.

And while I'm talking about supermarkets: people often think that the cost-of-living pressures are delivered by increased energy bills. It's true enough that when a consumer in a household gets an energy bill, if it has gone up it impacts on their cost of living. But that's only the smallest fraction of the real impact of higher energy costs. Fertiliser, which grows the food that comes to the supermarket, is energy. When it goes up, the price of food goes up. Fuel is used by farmers; when it goes up, the price of our goods go up. Factories, food-processing plants and abattoirs all use energy, and energy is embedded in those goods. Those goods are transported to market and, again, with the cost of energy going up, the cost of those goods go up. The supermarkets themselves face higher energy bills for lighting, refrigeration and heating; again, costs go up.

And so this government, instead of coming to this place with a bill which does nothing but duplicate existing facilities—fixated as it is on regulation push when it comes to this question, rather than on technology pull—would do well to trash, to bin, this bill and get back to the basics of what Australians need right now. They need a focus on lower energy costs because they need a focus on cost-of-living pressures, I encourage those opposite to think again.

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