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

Twenty-two per cent. I was going to say that it was higher than that. It's lower than I thought. So when the sun's shining you can rely on the sun for—let's round it to 25 per cent of the time. The wind's blowing for just over 30 per cent of the time. The issue that makes renewables expensive is that you need a backup, whether that's battery technology that doesn't even exist yet; gas, which we will obviously need to look at; or a baseload that needs to be ready to go when they're not working. All that adds to the cost of your energy.

The other thing they don't like talking about or never mention is, of course, the 28,000 kilometres of new transmission systems, poles and wires that you're going to have to build. Of course, when we were in government, we had a solar program for solar panels for people's roofs. It's pretty simple. Those are connected to the poles-and-wires system right now. But where you need to build these wind turbines and solar panels on mass scale is where there are no poles, wires and transmission systems. That's, we think, $100 billion, and probably more, to build that. That seems to be an off-balance-sheet consideration. We're not really taking that into account when we're looking at people's prices. Again, there's a whole lot of fallacies around that, so don't expect your energy bills to be coming down under this lot. In fact, unfortunately, not only should you not expect your energy bills to be coming down; you should expect the lights to be potentially going out soon as well.

Again, there have been lots of bad decisions by this government. Deputy Speaker Wilkie, I know you agree with me on issues 1 to 10. You might not agree with everything else I said today, but I know you agree with me on that. Unfortunately there are many, many decisions and many, many policies that this government is making that are accentuating the cost-of-living crisis in this country. I didn't even get onto the housing issue. I didn't even mention the 1.2 million people who have come into the country over the last few years, without enough houses to house them, which gives us our rent and housing crisis as well.

See this speech in context