Dan Repacholi (Hunter, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Last week the Leader of the Opposition stood in Sydney and made an important announcement about my electorate in the Hunter. He stood over 250 kilometres away and told the people in my electorate they would be getting a nuclear power station. He didn't even have the guts to tell it to their faces, and the half-baked announcement he made won't address our energy needs.

Imagine proposing a solution to an issue that doesn't actually resolve the issue until years after it's needed. It seems hard to imagine, but that's exactly what those opposite have done. Let's simplify this. Ninety per cent of our coal-fired power stations will come to their end of life by 2035. This means we will have to replace the gap this will leave in our energy supply. We could easily continue to build on the progress we are already making. We have renewable energies booming and more to come with offshore wind. We have battery technology being used to store the energy we are harvesting. We have super batteries going into sites at Liddell, Eraring and Lake Munmorah. We have pumped hydro sites established in the Hunter, with construction well underway, and we have firming power like the Kurri Kurri gas plant. All bases are covered. Those options provide stability to the grid and firming power when it's needed. We can continue with the current progress and have enough power in the grid come the time when most of the coal-fired power stations close in 2035. The transition would be seamless.

But the geniuses opposite me have come up with another plan. They have suggested we could spend all our money on nuclear power that will take 20-plus years to build and won't be ready when our coal-fired power stations reach their end of life. And that is only if a miracle can be performed. Those opposite, despite not one of them having experience in the nuclear sector, expect that Australia, which has no experience in the nuclear energy industry, to build these power stations faster than anyone else in the world ever has. Talk about mishandling energy policies and threatening reliability! I may not be a mathematician but it is clear that this does not add up. I know which option sounds to me more like a renewable energy policy, and it is not nuclear.

This is a pretty big stuff-up from the bloke who wants to be our Prime Minister. But it gets worse. The only thing bigger than this stuff-up will be the bill for the project, a project that leaves the lights off for years. We know this, not because the Leader of the Opposition told us in his half-baked policy announcement, which didn't include those details, but because the CSIRO has told us that the cost of power for nuclear reactors is up to eight times more than firm renewables.

The Leader of the Opposition said that the nuclear power station at Liddell would support jobs for decades to come. But he ignored one very important fact: we already have big plans for that site, plans that won't require compulsory acquisition. We announced earlier this year the billion-dollar Solar Sunshot plan that will see SunDrive Solar setting up a manufacturing plant on this site, creating over 5,000 jobs in the next decade. Just today it was announced that there will be another 50 jobs in the solar panel recycling centre on-site there as well.

My opposition to this plan for nuclear power in the Hunter is not ideological. Plenty of other countries around the world, like France, use nuclear power—and that is great for them. My opposition to this proposal for Muswellbrook is around the impact it will have on the jobs plans for our region. This half-baked plan from those opposite puts all these jobs under threat. The coalition's policy does not create jobs; it rips them out of the Hunter. Over 5,000 jobs will be ripped out of the Hunter for a nuclear power station that has not been costed, that has not been consulted on and that creates more questions than answers. The cost of these job losses to communities like Muswellbrook and Singleton will be devastating and felt for decades.

At the end of the day, this plan is too expensive, it hurts my community and it is the most expensive form of power out there. The Hunter deserves better and so does Australia. We had the member for Fairfax in the Hunter in Muswellbrook on Friday. He didn't tell anyone he was coming. He didn't tell any media outlets. He didn't even tell people around the town that he was coming. He just snuck on in there, after the disgraceful announcement that Peter Dutton made, because he did not have the guts to come to the Hunter and do it. We deserve better in the Hunter and Australia deserves better as well.

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