Michael McCormack (Riverina, National Party, Shadow Minister for International Development and the Pacific) Share this | Hansard source

Yes, I am quoting the IPA, because they correctly point out that there are hundreds of thousands of jobs at risk because of the rush to renewables. I'm not against renewables—I'm not—but when you have a government which is putting renewables and the rush to have renewables ahead of everything else that has been sound and safe and reliable and affordable and accessible and available in the past, what we're going to see are blackouts. What we're going to see are shutdowns at aluminium factories and other manufacturing sites. Yet the Labor members come in here and pretend as though they have got these great ideas and great policies and legislative frameworks to put forward proposals that they say are going to have a future of manufacturing made in Australia. The fact is, it's not going to lead to a better future for this nation. It's not going to create more jobs in manufacturing.

The previous Speaker, the member for McEwen, was talking about the coalition saying no, but here we have a government that say no to agriculture. They're saying no to live sheep exports out of Western Australia. And by doing so, they're going to place at risk the jobs of many families who've had that industry for many years. They're saying no to mining. They're saying no to fossil fuels, when we know that coal and iron ore and uranium and other exports that propped Australia up during COVID. Indeed, these exports have led the way for our balance of payments for many years, but the Treasurer, in his budget speech last year, couldn't even bring himself to say 'agriculture' and 'mining' and just said—wait for it—'the things we sell overseas'. He couldn't utter the word 'coal'. He couldn't utter the word 'gas'. He couldn't, for the first time in 25 years of Treasurers delivering budget speeches, mention the word 'infrastructure'.

What we did when we were in government is we had a $120 billion infrastructure rollout.

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