Darren Chester (Gippsland, National Party, Shadow Minister for Regional Education) Share this | Hansard source

When it comes to this government, the Albanese government, there are three simple facts you need to keep in mind whenever you examine proposed legislation. You know that blue-collar workers are going to be sold out in a desperate bid to win over Green preferences in the urban areas. You also know that it's always a good idea to read the fine print. We've got a slogan-led recovery. Every bill has a slogan in its title, but, when you start examining the substance, you realise that the bill actually contains something very different to what you'd imagine it might contain. The final thing you always need to keep at the back of your mind on every occasion when it comes to examining the Labor Party's approach to legislation is Labor's track record. Labor cannot manage money and can't be trusted to make good decisions with the Australian taxpayers' hard-earned dollars.

This goes to the heart of this bill. This Future Made in Australia Bill 2024 sounds absolutely wonderful. It sounds great. But, when you start examining it closely, you realise very quickly that this is more of a strategy to win re-election. It is more of a pork-barrelling fund, with Labor trying to pick winners in industries and seats that suit them and playing favourites with certain industry groups with taxpayers' money. Labor is quite happy to gamble with taxpayers' money for ideological reasons.

There is something that really concerns me when I look across the frontbench. I have been here for 16 years now, so I know a lot of the Labor frontbench quite well. I know their career histories very well, indeed, and I like a lot of them—they are good people—but there's no business experience anywhere in that cabinet. Not one person in that cabinet has actually run a small business, let alone a medium sized business. So the biggest skill shortage in Australia today is actually in the Labor Party cabinet. The shortage of people with business experience is quite extraordinary. When you then go and look closely at the legislation before the House, it is exposed to so many risks—a long line-up of corporate welfare recipients trying to get their hands on the money—and is being decided by a cabinet not with business experience but based on ideology. That's what really concerns me.

These bills expand the role of Export Finance Australia and ARENA and establish a national interest framework that retrospectively underpins the government's Future Made in Australia policy. The omnibus bill also expands ARENA's functions, from a pure R&D demonstration to the support of manufacturing, deployment and commercialisation. This is a slush fund, plain and simple, as many on this side of the House have identified very quickly in the debate. When I say it's ideologically driven, what concerns me is that, in my own electorate, we have projects which have been well researched and well considered by the coalition when it was in government and also by the state Labor Party when it has been in government in Victoria—projects like the Hydrogen Energy Supply Chain project. This project, at Loy Yang, in Gippsland, has attracted corporate support and large commitments from the Japanese government, but the federal Labor Party, this government, for ideological reasons will not support the Hydrogen Energy Supply Chain project, in Gippsland, because it utilises brown coal. It's obsessed with destroying the brown coal sector in Gippsland.

Brown coal has been an incredible resource in Gippsland and has underpinned the wealth of much of south-east Australia. Ever since Sir John Monash established the SEC a hundred years ago, the reliable and affordable energy generated from Latrobe Valley using brown coal has been critically important to the wealth of my community and the growth of Victoria more broadly. It's a resource that, using modern technology, research and projects—like the Hydrogen Energy Supply Chain project—will demonstrate that there are alternative uses for brown coal. It doesn't have to be put into a coal-fired power station and burnt purely for energy generation. There are other alternative uses for that product.

But, for ideological reasons, this once-great party, which once stood up for blue-collar workers, is quite happily seeing the demise of the entire sector and the demise of workers and families who rely on the brown coal industry. What we're seeing in my community is that, for ideological reasons, Labor, in pursuit of Green preferences, has forgotten the workers who used to underpin this once-great party.

You don't have to take my word for it; you can just examine the Australian Electoral Commission results during my time in this place, in the last 16 years. At election after election, the vote for me and the coalition has grown in Latrobe Valley, which was once a Labor Party heartland. The Labor Party doesn't even hold the state seat of Morwell anymore, a seat which was once a blue-ribbon seat for that party. It's all because this party, those opposite, have forgotten who they represent and have sold out blue-collar workers, all for Green preferences in the city.

But it's not just the coalition which is raising concerns with the bill before the House. Danielle Wood, the productivity commissioner and the government's key economic adviser, appointed by the Treasurer, Jim Chalmers, has said:

If we are supporting industries that don't have a long-term competitive advantage, that can be an ongoing cost.

…   …   …

We risk creating a class of businesses that is reliant on government subsidies, and that can be very effective in coming back for more.

This, again, goes to the heart of my concerns that a cabinet with no experience running their own business are somehow going to pick the winners through this Future Made in Australia Bill. It concerns me because the lack of business expertise and the risk to Australian taxpayers' money is going to be exposed over many years and at great cost to Australian taxpayers. In the middle of a cost-of-living crisis, Australian taxpayers are going to be footing the bill as the Albanese government tries to pick winners in the corporate sector.

Now, the previous speaker, the Minister for the Environment and Water, talked about energy security, and it is a very important debate to have in the context of this bill. There will be no future made in Australia unless there is reliable and affordable energy in our nation. As I touched on before, in the La Trobe Valley, with the brown-coal-fired power stations, the reliability and the affordability of that resource underpinned great economic wealth for my region and Victoria more broadly. The people in my community are perhaps a little more energy literate than those in most communities because of the fact that they've lived it. It's been where generations of people have gone to work. They understand what I call the energy trifecta, where your energy needs to be reliable, it needs to be affordable and you need to do your share as a nation in terms of contributing to the environmental outcomes the planet is seeking to achieve.

The energy trifecta is a difficult one because reliability and affordability are very pressing concerns for the industry, for the environmental movement and for those of us who care about the future of the planet and what our future generations will get to experience on this planet. We want to make sure we're good environmental citizens. When I look around my community, when I look around regional Australia, all I see is people who are actually passionate and practical environmentalists. It's the people in regional Australia who join Landcare, who undertake the practical environmental work and who are out there doing pest animal control, weed control and replanting vegetation. So to have those opposite come in here and lecture regional Australians as if they don't care about the environment is completely misplaced criticism and unfair to regional Australians.

When I talk about the energy trifecta in regional Australia, I want to make those opposite understand that the people in my community want a balanced approach. They don't want to see a government put all its eggs in one basket on a renewables-only approach. It is madness, at a time when those opposite and, in particular, the crossbench warn about more severe and unpredictable weather events, to then say, 'Let's have a 100 per cent weather-dependent energy system.' It is madness. You have warnings about climate. You have warnings about increased variability in weather events and more severe weather events, and then you put all your eggs in a 100 per cent weather-dependent basket. It is complete madness.

On this side of the House, we believe in a balanced approach. The overwhelming majority of people in the coalition, and certainly in my party room, acknowledge that there is a role for renewable energy sources. But it has to be based on respect for landowners, respect for the communities which will host them and an understanding that you can't put all your eggs in that one basket.

It has been extraordinarily condescending to listen to many of those opposite try to invoke The Simpsons when anyone wants to have a conversation about the future of nuclear energy in this country. It's condescending because it ignores the fact that there are more than 30 countries around the world safely operating nuclear power stations today with modern technology. It's actually quite juvenile. It's juvenile and it's demeaning to have Labor MPs continually joking about three-eyed fish. If that's your reference point for this debate, you really have exited the whole conversation that needs to be had in this nation.

Australians aren't interested in a scare campaign; they want a facts campaign. They want to know how these other countries are running these nuclear power stations safely and how they are storing the waste products safely. They want to know what the cost is to households and the manufacturing sector. And then they also want to know what the lifetime costs of the wind turbines and the solar panels are. Can you recycle them? What is the cost of doing that? Who's responsible for bringing down the wind turbines once they reach the end of their useful life? Well, it appears it's the landowners, at great cost to them personally. Also, what is the return to those regional communities that are expected to host this industrial-scale land use on what used to be prime agricultural land? This is a complex debate, and it can't be dumbed down to stupid references about The Simpsons.

At a time when our nation provides an incredible amount of food to other countries in the world, surely taking away productive agricultural land and turning it into a wind factory or a solar farm needs to have a little bit of a pause for thought. There are people in our near region who don't have access to the same amount of food that we have. Australian farmers, as world-class producers, export two-thirds of what we actually produce. We are great growers of food. We have the benefit of the technology, of the arable land and of the skills in our farming sector. Replacing or displacing that land use for another use—energy generation—needs to be done very seriously with great contemplation, with great respect to landowners, and also involving a mature debate with the Australian population. For those of us on this side of the House, we're up for the debate. We're up for the debate about nuclear, solar, wind, gas and also, where appropriate, prolonged use of some of those coal resources or alternative uses of some of those coal resources.

Now, the two newest power stations in the La Trobe Valley, Loy Yang A and Loy Yang B, were both slated to operate into the 2040s. They could operate safely and successfully in the 2040s in conjunction with more renewables. Gas is incredibly important to overcome the intermittency of solar and wind. Professor Arnold Dix, an expert in this field, commented to me the other day in relation to his desire to see high-speed rail in Australia, 'You don't have an electrified high-speed rail network and set the timetable based on whether the wind's blowing in Bass Strait. You need that reliable, affordable baseload energy source as well.' I continue to have an open mind on the nuclear debate because I believe that, if you are going to have a future made in Australia, as this bill proposes, you need to have a balanced approach to our future energy needs. Securing reliability and affordability and meeting our international targets are actually matters of national security. You have to be in a position to maintain your manufacturing sector with reliable and affordable energy, and I believe we should be taking advantage of a range of technologies to meet the challenge of supplying the energy Australia needs both today and into the future.

For people listening at home—all three of them!—energy security is about keeping the lights on. A country has to have the ability to keep the lights on. The country has to be able to run the public transport network, hospitals and universities, and ensure businesses and farmers can still produce their goods at a competitive price. All those things are needed in a modern and complex society like Australia. We can't do that with a 100 per cent weather-dependent system.

Time has escaped me, but I would make one final reference in relation to the bill regarding this Future Made in Australia and the ideological nature of the modern Labor Party. I can guarantee you that, on this Future made in Australia, when this cabinet is making decisions about what it will and won't support, the native hardwood timber industry will be ruled out. It's been ruled out of the National Reconstruction Fund. They'll rule it out because of their zealotry around trying to secure Greens preferences in the cities. I've already seen in my electorate what's happened since the hardwood timber industry has been run out of business by the state Labor government. When it comes to timber, you can use either your own wood or someone else's wood. Unfortunately, when it comes to the Australian Labor Party, they're quite happy to import timber from countries with poor environmental protocols. I encourage the modern Labor Party to re-establish its connections with blue-collar workers and stop selling out Australians for Greens preferences.

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