Kevin Hogan (Page, National Party, Shadow Minister for Trade and Tourism) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member opposite for the compliment that, 'This will be good.' I want to read a quote to you from Sydney's Northern Beaches Advocate on 7 July 2020. The article is on a proposal for eight wind turbines and a one-hectare solar farm at North Head in Sydney. The proposal was made by a group called the Global Warming Solution. They're self-described as 'a community platform made up of people determined to do something about climate change'.

In response to an inquiry from the Northern Beaches Advocate, the member for Warringah, Zali Steggall, said this:

I would be doubtful that a sensitive environmental and culturally significant area like North Head is the appropriate location.

That says everything about sanctimony corner over there with the teals and the Greens, and the sanctimony line down there of inner-city MPs. We can imagine, can't we, North Head with eight turbines on the hill there, and how much that culturally would upset sailing around Sydney Harbour, how much it would upset having a double macchiato at Sydney Bower there. We've just destroyed culturally everything that happens in Sydney. We understand how much environmental damage one hectare—not a big space—would do.

I don't have a problem so much that the member for Warringah and other inner-city Labor MPs and Greens have said things like that about projects in the city, but what gets me is the absolute hypocrisy of, 'Don't do it in my patch, but go hell for leather in regional and remote Australia.' That's what they're saying here.

It gets worse, though, because when the member for Warringah was talking about this, she was asked about proposals that were going on in Port Stephens, which is obviously up the coast a bit, and proposals in the Illawarra. You know what she said about members on this side who voiced cultural and environmental concerns about those projects? She said, 'They are scaremongering and spreading disinformation.' There is the hypocrisy of this. We can't do wind turbines and a hectare of solar panels on North Head.

Just to put this into perspective, with Labor's reckless renewable-only policy, do you know how many solar panels have to be built around Australia by 2030? Sixty million—not a hectare. You know how many wind turbines are needed to get to that policy? Not the eight that they were looking at on North Head, but tens of thousands. Of course, if you listen to the hypocrisy of sanctimony corner, that's okay because they can all be built in rural and regional Australia, where obviously there are no cultural or environmental issues to deal with.

Let's go through some of the issues that people where I live and where a lot of my colleagues live are concerned about—the tens of millions of solar panels that need to be built and the tens of thousands of wind turbines that need to be built. We do not believe that this is scaremongering and misinformation. This is about habitat loss and fragmentation. This is about disruption of bird migration. This is about ecosystem disruption. This is about soil erosion.

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