Simon Kennedy (Cook, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

The member for Hunter talks about being misleading on energy. I'd just like to remind the member that this is from a government that promised $275 off power bills. There are people in my electorate who are paying a thousand dollars more after that promise, so they've already been misled.

The member for Hunter also talked about affordable and sustainable energy. Labor is failing Australia on both of those measures. Labor has failed to bring down energy prices. Since Labor were elected and took government, prices are more than 20 per cent higher. Labor is failing to adequately decarbonise the grid, when no expert believes we're on track to reach 2030, 2035 or 2050 carbonisation targets.

Labor's plan means higher prices and risks rolling blackouts, and Australians know this. They know it because they feel it. Every time they look at their bill and every time they struggle with the cost of living, they know this plan is not delivering what it promised. And why are prices going up? Why are we on track to miss our targets? It's because there isn't a real plan there. They don't know what it will cost. AEMO and the nuclear inquiry admitted that they didn't know what it would cost. They admitted their plan doesn't cost the actual Labor plan. What they can cost is narrowly prescribed.

For the first time we've had someone research the entire cost. Frontier Economics, an independent organisation, has modelled it to be $640 billion. That's more than $25,000 for each Australian. This is because Frontier has looked at it and has said:

Most of these costs—

many of which are yet to be incurred—

are treated by AEMO and NEM governments as "sunk", even though the majority of these projects are yet to be developed.

They went on to say:

Customers and taxpayers will, of course, pay for these projects irrespective of how AEMO classify them.

They also said:

This is likely to be an underestimate of the costs given the propensity for project costs, and particularly transmission projects, to blowout …

Australia is now being left behind the rest of the world. Of the G20 countries, there are only three nations with no plans to build nuclear reactors, and of these three nations—the other two being Germany and Spain—we are the only market that does not import nuclear energy. Microsoft, Amazon and Google are now investing billions of dollars. Figures given to me by the Parliamentary Library show that Canada, the US and Korea—all countries with nuclear power as part of their mix—have much lower prices compared to Australia. In Canada it's US$127, in the US it's US$137, and in Korea it's US$151, whereas in Australia it's US$212.

The US Department of Energy recently released a report that modelled the Californian grid. California is a state on the Pacific Ocean. It has lots of wind and lots of inland land with lots of sun. They looked at what it would cost the Californian grid to be on solar and wind. Then they looked at what it would cost for the Californian grid to be on solar, wind and nuclear. What did the US Department of Energy find about introducing nuclear into a solar and wind grid? It found prices would go down by 37 per cent.

With all this new information, and understanding that we have an energy plan that pre-dates the advent and the take-off of AI, which has seen some of the most environmentally conscious companies in the world—Microsoft, Google, Amazon—invest billions of dollars in nuclear, what have we done? We've actually reneged on and exited from an agreement with our closest allies, the US and the UK.

On this agreement, we were talking about where nuclear is at in the world. Well, last year at COP-28, 31 countries signed up to triple nuclear energy—a 300 per cent increase—by 2050. Then they followed that up this year, announcing that we along with France, Korea, Japan, Canada and Switzerland would be joining a collaborative research group to share research and intelligence on nuclear energy. What is the downside for the Australian people in being a part of that? But no sooner had the US and the UK announced this than, embarrassingly, Australia reneged on this—reneged from this information, reneged from having facts and reneged from having a mature debate.

I'm also part of the Select Committee on Nuclear Energy, and we've heard a lot of testimony, most recently from a Green, Tyrone D'Lisle, who challenged Peter Dutton in 2013—and I quote him from last week in the area where he's from in Queensland—who said:

"I came to look at the scale of the climate challenge and what would be required to genuinely address it … we just won't be able to achieve it unless we include technologies like nuclear energy"—

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