Chris Bowen (McMahon, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Climate Change and Energy) Share this | Hansard source

I'm delighted to take this opportunity to provide the House with a brief update on some of the measures that the government has implemented in the climate change and energy space since we last gathered. I'll deal firstly with electricity, which the honourable member for Lindsay referred to. I might start by referring to the welcome release yesterday of AEMO's winter 2024 outlook, which hasn't been mentioned, as far as I've seen, by any member opposite since it was released. It notes the situation going into winter:

Similar operating conditions to last winter are expected this year for Australia's energy systems …

That is according to the Australian Energy Market Operator. It goes on to say:

Months of planning with industry, governments and network businesses has gone into preparing the energy systems for the winter ahead—

which is of course true. Importantly, they go on to say:

There is a significant uplift in the availability of existing generation going into this winter since last year, as well as an expected 600 MW of new battery energy storage systems and nearly 1,300 MW of new renewable generation connecting to the NEM to meet demand this winter.

It's a very good report in terms of winter readiness. Those opposite like to make quite alarmist and dishonest representations regarding our energy system. The member for Fairfax said that there would be blackouts last summer. There was no blackout caused by a lack of energy generation. Of course, every system has to deal with transmission towers being knocked over in cyclones and other incidents. That happens, regardless of whoever is in government. But, in terms of a lack of energy reserves, we saw no blackout last summer. Now the member for Fairfax is predicting blackouts next summer. He'll presumably just continue to do that.

We prefer to get on with the job of ensuring the transition in the energy system and ensuring reliability as we do so, because renewable energy is a reliable form of energy when you compare it to coal fired power generation, which is increasingly ageing and increasingly unreliable. That's no fault of the operators of those coal fired power stations or the people who work very hard in them; they're just very old pieces of kit, increasingly. We see a substantial period of time in which we have unexpected outages in our coal fired power generation, but I'm pleased that last year, AEMO approved 6,817 megawatts of new connections—an increase of more than 2,000 megawatts from the previous financial year.

I was interested to hear the member for Lindsay say that we need more supply, because we do. It's partly because, under the last decade, we saw four gigawatts of dispatchable energy leave the grid and only one gigawatt come in. They had the UNGI scheme, which should have stood for 'unfortunately no generation involved' because it delivered not a gigawatt, not a megawatt, not a watt, not an electron into the system. That's what we saw with the 22 energy policies of those opposite.

The member for Fremantle asked me to comment on nuclear. All I will say in relation to nuclear is that it is very much the wrong and risky answer for Australia. Nuclear power plants take a very long time to build, and they are very, very expensive to build. Why you would do that, when you compare it to renewable energy, which is much cheaper to build and faster to build, is beyond me, but that's up to those opposite. They might one day get around to actually releasing a policy, and them we might be able to debate that policy. It was promised 12 weeks ago. It was promised before the budget. In hindsight—I've checked the record—to be fair to those opposite, they didn't say which budget. Maybe it wasn't meant to be this year's.

In the time remaining, I might touch on some other matters across the Climate Change and Energy portfolio. I'm very pleased to report to the House, as I think honourable members will recall, that last sitting week the House and the Senate passed the new vehicle efficiency standards—a long overdue reform in the too-hard basket for 20 years. Transport emissions are our third-biggest source of emissions and are on track to become our biggest source of emissions if we don't act. Because we are getting our emissions down from electricity and industry, transport will rocket up and become our largest source of emissions if we don't have the right policy framework. The new vehicle efficiency standards are a very, very big part of that framework. They were promised by the coalition when they were in office. The coalition then squibbed it and couldn't deliver it. I was disappointed that the coalition didn't support our package, given that they had tried something very similar when they were in office. The opposition has become so negative that they oppose not only our policies but also their own.

I'm pleased with the progress we're making. We have much more to do. We have the six sector plans well under development. We have a new net zero 2050 plan well under development, which will replace the previous government's technology assumption that somehow something magical in the future will get us to net zero. We'll continue that work. I thank the government members and the crossbench for consistently supporting that work thus far.

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