Nola Marino (Forrest, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Education) Share this | Hansard source

Right. We have a site that was commissioned in 2001, and it will have to be decommissioned in 2027 because it's too expensive to re-power. Will this be repeated? How often? The company has yet to announce what it will do with the neighbouring Yambuk wind farm, commissioned in 2007. We'll wait and see what happens there. I suspect the same will happen with offshore wind turbines as well.

Labor's renewables-only policy is failing the Australian people and failing business and failing families. The cost of energy is driving businesses absolutely to the wall or to fail or to consider leaving Australia. Labor's energy approach is actually five times the cost that Australians were initially promised. Families and businesses are bearing this cost. It is obscene, in a resource-rich country like Australia. It is absolutely obscene. Energy bills have risen by up to 52 per cent, and more than 27,000 businesses have been forced to close their doors. There's no doubt that soaring energy costs are a major reason for these closures. These high-energy costs apply right throughout your input—at all stages of your input. Every input will involve an energy cost, and that adds to your cost of doing business. Business and industry—ACCI and COSBOA's—concerns are being totally ignored by the government. How on earth can Labor talk about a future made in Australia when business, industry and households don't have affordable, dispatchable power? It's that simple. What is even worse, Labor is putting Australia's energy security into China's hands. Every 20 to 25 years, the wind turbines and solar panels that are made mostly in China will have to be replaced. We will be dependent on China for our energy security, and this will compromise our national security. Anyone in this House knows, and everyone should know, that energy security and national security are actually the same thing. You can't have one without the other.

In WA we are short of power, and in my electorate I have businesses and industries that are paid by AEMO to switch off their processing to feed the power into the grid just to keep the lights and air conditioners on in Perth. I've even seen what I think is power rationing over summer in the south-west in my area, even at my home and on our farm. Synergy, the state government owned energy generator, is supposed to provide between 220 and 250 volts to my house. Over summer it got down to 212 and 214 volts only. I've had Synergy out to have a look at this. We have to have a generator because we can't be sure we're going to have power. You can imagine, with this type of power and generator, then trying to connect the transfer box, what was going on in that space.

We've seen prices increasing in WA significantly. WA-owned power company Synergy recently sent me an email saying they were increasing my small businesses' power bills. It is happening to small businesses right across Western Australia. They are reporting 30 per cent increases in price in some instances. But Synergy offered me a special deal, a subsidised deal where, as a taxpayer, my taxes would be paying a government subsidy. This is the WA government with a hand in each of my pockets at once. This is just another example of the challenges we're facing with energy in Western Australia. As we know in WA, we have a significant amount of gas, and gas is the transition fuel in Western Australia. It is up to the state government and to Synergy to make sure that we have the power we need in our businesses and our households. It should not be that businesses and industries in my electorate have to turn off and stop their production just so that they can keep the lights on in Perth and keep enough power in the system. There is a shortage of power even in Western Australia, of all places.

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