Tania Lawrence (Hasluck, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

'Risky and expensive' sounds like a good working definition of the coalition's half-baked nuclear plans to meet Australia's energy needs. You can add to that 'useless', unless you plan on going to sleep like some sort of Rip Van Winkle for the next 20 years or more—20 years of paying a fortune to build nuclear power stations. And who will pay? Taxpayers are expected to pay for this coalition's plan.

The member for Fairfax is not a good listener. He certainly didn't listen to his own leader, Peter Dutton, when last year, on 2 March, in a sit-down interview, he said: 'I don't support the establishment of big nuclear facilities. I'm opposed to it.' The member for Fairfax certainly did not listen to the advice from the CSIRO about the terrible costs of nuclear energy, which have put out that for a single large-scale reactor in Australia, at around $16 billion and 20 years to build, multiplied by the number of reactors required—according to the coalition's only piece of detail provided—would be about $600 billion that taxpayers would have to pay.

The member for Fairfax isn't listening to people like the executive director of the International Energy Agency, who was unimpressed and advised Australia to prioritise our untapped potential in solar and wind power. He's certainly not listening to the coalmine operators, because if he did, he would hear that generators will be decommissioned by the early 2030s. In fact, in WA the coal-fired power plant at Collie is expected to reach its end of life by 2027. So any nuclear power in Australia—assuming that the legislation that has banned its use is revoked by the Liberals, assuming that we could find experienced, skilled nuclear physicists and engineers needed to be able to commission such a facility, and assuming that we've got all the regulations in place, the planning and the community support—would, at the earliest, happen by the mid-2040s. So the economics are junk and the reality of the policy—or the plan, because it's really not a policy, is it?—is junk, because you've got this massive gap between the end of life of our existing coal facilities and their supposed solution instead.

I have a thought for the member for Fairfax: if he thought that his party room was united around this, surely he has to think again. He only needs to look to his left and he'll see the coalition's National members, who would dearly like to have this nuclear bomb go away, especially in their electorates, with an election coming. The member for Fairfax could then look to his right, and he'll see an LNP member who additionally knows that the Liberals and the Nationals have only ever talked about nuclear energy in opposition, never while they were in government. They did nothing on this policy while there were in government, and they've certainly done nothing on this policy today. It's a policy in name only. The member for Fairfax could look behind him, and he should. He should start looking behind him more often, and there he will find more than one LNP member who understands that our energy future is a renewable energy future and that they really just wish that their party would get onboard with this transition and bring this debate to where it needs to be: in the future and not stuck in the past.

The LNP simply hasn't thought it through together yet, and the coalition isn't fond of thinking things through. They literally love just the talk. They lump renewables together as if they were all the same thing. With a casual use of that word, they dismiss the possibilities of wind, solar, hydro and geothermal power. Australia has all these energy sources to work with, to work out and to balance. It will take work, and work has already begun and is bearing fruit with the installed renewable capacity generating power for some 3½ million homes. We've approved 60 renewable energy projects which will power a further seven million homes.

The only risk with regard to renewable energy is not taking action. By building nuclear power stations, apparently all the other problems along the way will eventually go away and everything will be fixed. What do we do in the meantime, in the 20 years it will take one to get up and running? We keep them out of government and focus on our renewable pathway the whole way.

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