Sam Birrell (Nicholls, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

Yes, I look forward to that. SPC's had an interesting history. Fruit processing is not what it was, because we're a lot better at getting the fresh products onto the table now than we used to be, so people don't have as many processed fruit products as they used to, but there's still a market there. They also have tomato manufacturing. Again, that's a heat process.

J Furphy & Sons manufacture tanks and have been doing so since the late 1800s. Nowadays, those tanks are high-tech stainless steel engineered tanks for the beer, wine and milk industries and all sorts of other things, but when they started out in the late 1800s and early 1900s they were making water tanks, and those water tanks went over with our diggers to World War I, in the field. The diggers would all stand around the Furphy water cart having a drink and exchanging gossip and rumours, and that's where the term 'furphy' comes from. I think there are a few furphies told in this place, more this term than previously—anyway, I digress.

Rubicon has manufactured great things in irrigation technology. We have a company called Pental, which manufactures a lot of chemical products. White King is a brand. Campbell's Soup gets a lot of vegetable products from around the area and manufactures them in Shepparton into processed food products. There's another one called MC Pipes. MC Pipes is a manufacturer of large, concrete pipes for housing developments—crucial.

We sit in here and we talk about housing. We fire across these missives to each other on housing, and the Greens do their thing on housing. But, if we're going to increase supply, we've got to make sure that everything that goes into a new housing development is manufactured at an effective cost. Just one of those things, which is manufactured in my electorate, is the big stormwater drainpipes. We've got to make sure that those companies have a future made in Australia if we are going to look after them.

The reason I mention all of those businesses in my electorate of Nicholls is that I talk to them often. What they need is cheap and reliable energy. The cheap and reliable energy in Victoria has come—and will probably come for a bit longer—in the form of burning brown coal in Gippsland, and that's what we did. In other parts of Australia, we burn a higher quality coal to create cheap baseload dispatchable energy. We did that for a long time because we had it and it was cheap, and we'll probably still do it for a while. The reason we didn't look to technology such as nuclear, when every other country was, is that we thought we could keep burning this coal into the future. But climate change and the challenges associated with that have led us, and many around the world, to say that we have to eventually get out of fossil fuels at the rate that we're burning them at the moment. I accept that.

When I came into this place, in my maiden speech, I said that climate change is a big challenge and, to stop some temperature rises that would cause some real challenges for us in the future, we need to act with the globe. But what I also said was that how we act is critical because, if we get it wrong with unrealistic timelines and we have an ideological approach to technologies that feel good or we might think are the right technologies, then we could really stuff up Australia's economy. We might see businesses, like the ones I have just talked about in my electorate, move offshore because they can't get cheap and reliable energy in Australia and so they'll go and find cheap and reliable energy somewhere else. Global emissions won't have changed. It won't have the slightest effect on the climate change challenges that the globe faces, but what it will have a big effect on is Australia's ability to manufacture.

The reason we are so worried about this bill is that it's got that ideology: 'We feel good about this technology, so we're going to put all the eggs into that basket.' Green hydrogen is just one of those things. When the former coalition government began this sort of scheme, the program was originally designed to certify and track the emissions intensity associated with hydrogen production, allowing buyers, both domestic and international, to verify the green credentials of energy sources that would feed into the production processes for hydrogen. But Labor seems to have hijacked this policy principle. This scheme, and the reason we've got so many problems with it, is that it's not technologically agnostic. It favours some forms of renewables—wind and solar—over others, like hydro. It could become a mechanism for a broader economy-wide carbon price. The member for Riverina outlined the history of that. He's been in this place a lot longer than I have, and he talked about some of the challenges with that.

Again, this bill is about that ideological 'this technology feels right so we're going to back it' approach to our energy transition. But scientific knowledge and the analysis of what is viable moves really fast. I dare say it moves a lot faster than governments and parliaments, so this picking winners idea where governments think, 'This is the way to go; we're going to pick this winner,' is problematic. Picking winners is problematic at any time. I went to Derby day and tried to pick some winners, but I had no success. But the next day at Mornington I did a lot better and my wallet was a bit fuller. I don't bet much, but I have a flutter around the Spring Racing Carnival. But what Labor are doing is going to the races and saying, 'We're going to put all our money on this horse,' and that's what I worry about, especially when there are so many options around the world.

I'm really happy that this debate is happening because it didn't previously. But I wish it was a bit more of a sensible debate in this place about nuclear energy. It's one of the tools that can help get us to a cleaner energy future and make sure that we have the baseload power for a genuine future made in Australia. We are up against countries that are using this technology to power their factories, to make sure their factories have got enough electricity.

When I came into this place and talked about climate change, I said we have to use all the technologies in the world to be able to approach this big challenge of how do we have a future made in Australia when we can't burn coal anymore? You look around the world and you say—and I did. I went to Europe last year. I was looking at education, but I asked everyone, 'What are you doing about making sure that your industry has enough energy to continue?'

In Sweden they said: 'We don't talk about renewables anymore. We don't say we have a renewable future. We say we have a low-emissions future.' They've commissioned new reactors. Finland is fascinating because the Finnish Green League are interested in reducing carbon emissions. They're not interested in having this fight about what sorts of technologies we use, they're just interested in reducing carbon emissions for the benefit of the planet. So the Green League in Finland are supportive of nuclear energy because they think that's a good way for them to get there. Germany is ruing relying too much on renewables and piped gas from Russia. France is very pleased that it has gone down the path where 70 per cent of their energy is from nuclear. Canada is moving towards nuclear. The United States is moving further into nuclear.

One of the most powerful things that was said to me—this goes back to the very ideology of this bill, which is the picking winners thing—is that we don't know what's going to be a winner. Everyone thought green hydrogen was going to be a big winner a year or two ago and now we're seeing it may not be the big winner that it looked like it was going to be. Companies are pulling out of green hydrogen. Now, it might come back. Someone might find a way to make green hydrogen work, and I hope so. But if it doesn't and the government has put all of its eggs in that basket, then I really worry about where we're going to be.

But what was said to me by an expert in energy and energy systems—at the moment nuclear fission is good and it's a technology we should be heading down. The best time to start was yesterday, but if you didn't start yesterday then you have to start now. But he said: 'What if fission works? What if nuclear fission becomes the technology that really takes off?' It's not there at the moment. It's not there yet.

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