David Gillespie (Lyne, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

The Net Zero Economy Authority Bill 2024 and the Net Zero Economy Authority (Transitional Provisions) Bill 2024 are green-sounding, motherhood-statement-type bills, the latest and greatest of many that this government is introducing, trying to portray a change of our baseload energy system into a mythical, utopian green renewable based energy system. The legislation will coordinate the destruction of our energy system, coordinate policy and planning across government, and facilitate both government and private participation in investment—which is usually code for 'price signals', commonly known as subsidies—and support for affected workers. It will support First Nations Australians to participate in the transition—I'm just not too sure how solar panels and wind farms will do that—and deliver educational and promotional initiatives as Australia transitions to a net zero economy.

People have to understand what is in store for us. A lot of very smart people and economic modellers—including people from the University of Melbourne, Princeton University, the University of Queensland, the Nous Group and many other eminent scientists and environmental economists—published, two years ago, the Net zero Australia study. They added up the cost of what will be required for us to transition, orchestrated by this authority.

We are going to overbuild renewables many times. Our current 25-gigawatt system will be replaced with 400 to 500 gigawatts of solar and wind generation, up to 23,000 kilometres of extra poles and wires, 58 million solar panels and 35,000 wind turbines, with the consumption of many millions of acres of either grazing pasture country or pristine bushlands on hilltops as well as an explosion of pumped hydro schemes in Queensland and New South Wales. It is going cheap—only $7 trillion to $9 trillion! That is not a transition; that is absolute lunacy! We don't mind that renewables have their place in the system, but to try and build a whole system based on weather dependent, randomly variable generators is absolute madness. We have already closed 7,300 megawatts of 24/7 reliable power, with the closure of many power stations.

This series of bills does not deliver a just transition. It's going to affect all of us. It's not just going to affect people in a coalmine or working at a power station—but they are the first cab off the rank. We are all in this together because the whole economy of the nation depends on electricity. We are destroying our cheap electricity system. It is already multiple times more expensive than it was when we had predominantly baseload with a sprinkling of renewables. In flipping it on its head, we are losing the affordability and the reliability; affordability and cheap electricity have gone out the window. We're also inadvertently threatening our food security for seafood, with wind turbines and wind farms plonked smack in the middle of many prominent fishing grounds off the New South Wales coast, off the Illawarra and off Port Stephens. Because we are misallocating capital on a gigantic scale and we have electricity that is very expensive, we are driving inflation. The blood and the circulation of any industrial economy depends on your electricity system. We have already lost over half a million manufacturing jobs in this country, and we're not even halfway—we are a quarter of the way—to the so-called net zero transition.

A lot of people haven't connected the dots, and it's up to us in this House to explain to people what this means. It will be a cataclysmic loss of our energy security. We already have many systems in place that these new bodies will add to or be confused with. The Clean Energy Finance Corporation and the Australian Renewable Energy Agency are already doing many of the things this authority, which will be given another fresh lot of appropriations, will do as well. It is very much a duplicated, unnecessary authority, but the problem with it is the whole premise of what it's meant to be doing; that is the crazy thing. As I said, most people are very happy to have solar panels on their roof and do their bit for the environment, but when you base the whole grid on weather dependent night-and-day-happening energy systems as well as batteries, as well as pumped hydro schemes, as well as millions of acres of pristine bushland and good farming grazing country and cropping country being covered with solar panels and wind farms—and the vast majority are not made in this country; they are imported from China and some from Europe, but the market for all these renewable generators is being swamped by cheap renewables coming out of China.

The other thing is there is no mention anywhere of funding the cheapest, the cleanest and the most green energy system that the world has got, that the rest of the world is transitioning to at a rate of knots—that is, nuclear energy. Nuclear energy has the smallest carbon footprint of any scalable energy generation system. If you're mining uranium for a nuclear power plant, without open-cut mining, it actually has a lower carbon footprint than solar and wind. It has energy density thousands of times higher than a solar panel or a wind turbine, and it works around the clock. The leftover spent fuel is a valuable resource that can be recycled, as opposed to burying acres and square miles of used wind turbine blades. Wind turbine generators have a five- or six-year life before they need major refurbishment and those last much longer than their stated life for when they're operating at sea. We only have to see the problems that Germany, Europe, England, the UK, Texas and California have—all those countries that have been on this transition have found out the hard way. Yet here we are, 10 years behind them and mimicking exactly what they've done. They have found out and are backtracking, realising that they need to triple nuclear energy generation in Europe and in America.

It's happening in Africa; there has just been a huge nuclear conference there, and Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa and many other countries are all planning massive nuclear expansion. Many Asian economies have realised that; Japan has brought back online 11 of its mothballed nuclear power stations. France is expanding and Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands—all these countries which have been involved in nuclear, and some of them who have paused in the last 10 or 12 years, are reactivating their plans because they know it's scalable and that it's cheap when you have a system based on baseload systems as the predominant source of electricity.

The other thing that I'll mention is that one of the outlined jobs is to identify power station employees that are employed by a corporation, either private or corporate. This authority is going to get all their details and somehow, mysteriously, give them an equivalent job. But the best job for people working in a power station is to put them into a similar job in a nuclear power station. That's because a nuclear power station is almost exactly the same as a coal-fired power station. It's only the pressure vessel which is different, where, through the wonder of fission, the nuclear material hits and boils water. Nuclear power stations are basically big kettles, but instead of firing granular coal in to boil the water, they just have enriched uranium sitting there. It's enriched up to only four to five per cent, it gets to a critical mass, it starts to glow red-hot and boils water. That's the wonder of fission; you don't have to do anything, you just have to get a critical amount of it in one spot. Then that boiling water and steam run in a separate circuit and there's a heat-transfer system. Then—hey, presto!—it's just like a gas-fired power station. It spins the turbines; that's what happens with the steam and boiling water out of nuclear fission.

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