Anne Webster (Mallee, National Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Regional Health) Share this | Hansard source

This set of appropriation bills— Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2024-2025, Appropriation Bill (No. 4) 2024-2025 and Appropriation (Parliamentary Departments) Bill (No. 2) 2024-2025—seeks appropriations for a combined $12.1 billion. We on this side of the House care greatly about how taxpayers' money is spent, and an incoming Dutton and Littleproud government will have the nation's first minister for government efficiency, in the form of Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, alongside the future assistant minister for waste reduction, James Stephens. I cannot wait to see them run the ruler over every agency and find efficiencies and, of course, inefficiencies.

We know that under the Albanese government the cost of living has increased substantially and real wages are not keeping up. The coalition is committed to fighting tooth and nail for everyday Australians to find savings everywhere we can. On that front, I focus today on energy policy, because this is a government that, before they were elected, promised 97 times that they would reduce power bills permanently by $275 per annum. That promise was officially broken on 1 January this year. They hate to talk about it. It was a big promise. It was a bold promise and it is broken. Why is this promise broken? It is because this government couldn't deliver an outcome even if it was gift-wrapped on their doorstep. Yes, that's part of it. Is it broken because this is an incompetent government unready for office and showing no sign of improvement? Yes to that, too. The promise to reduce energy bills is also broken because Labor are joined at the hip with the Australian Greens political party.

Labor didn't run in the Prahran by-election for some bizarre reason, but in the seats that Labor do hold they fret about losing them to the Greens. So Labor rob regions such as mine in Mallee to buy votes in the inner cities, throwing country people under the figurative bus to save themselves from the Greens.

Labor thinks that a rapid race to a political carbon emissions reduction target is the smart thing to do. It is not. The Albanese Labor government is turning Australia into an international pariah. No nation of the geographic scale of Australia with a tiny emissions profile like Australia's is doing what this blind government is doing with 28,000 kilometres of transmission lines across agricultural electorates like mine with VNI West. Almost every other developed nation is turning to zero emissions nuclear energy for the long term.

The coalition has a responsible plan for energy policy. When I look at the almost $179 million in the bill for the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, and the $263 million-plus from the Department of Industry, Science and Resources, and the $33 million for agricultural, fisheries and forestry, I wonder, for that collective taxpayer spending of in excess of $575 million, how nobody has piped up and said: What about nuclear? What about learning from the rest of the world? What about our farmers and fishers and the impact that that reckless energy policy is having on them? Either those agencies are incompetent, or this is a government so blind to its political and ideological energy target that it simply won't listen to sound advice. Worse than the direct taxpayer impact of the government spending in this bill, spending on agencies that are either incompetent or ignored by the government anyway, there are hidden costs to every taxpayer as a consequence of collective energy policy failures at state and federal levels.

In my home state of Victoria, we have a state Labor government as well as the federal Labor government zeroing in on my electorate of Mallee as Labor's dumping ground for bad policy, namely railroading small regional communities and farmers with unwanted wind turbines, solar panels and transmission lines to boot. Don't buy the spin from foreign wind cowboy companies. Over 90 per cent of over 1,800 people who own, work or have close connections with farms oppose renewable projects on farmland according to a recent survey by farming advocacy group Farms for Food. Victorian Labor had six renewable energy zones in their initial plans. Now almost all the singular REZ is landing in Mallee.

While Australians struggle with the cost of living and 27,000 small businesses have gone to the wall under Labor, with energy costs a major factor in failing business viability, Labor pretends that it's $275 permanent energy reduction promise never happened. The arsonists stand there with a bucket of water, pretending they're helping. They toss into the energy crisis bonfire a one-off series of four quarterly payments to somehow nurse their wounded polling through an election. Mark my words: once the election passes, power bills will surge back up again. This government cares far, far more about its own political survival in inner-city electorates than it does about struggling Australians and battling small businesses.

Labor is dividing the Mallee with duplicated infrastructure that we will not need if we put zero-emission nuclear energy at existing coal-fired power plant sites. Labor forgets that, during the early decades of this century, energy bill payers already paid a fortune to gold-plate our transmission network. Government set reliability standards that were high in order to meet peak-demand events which might occur only a few times a year—namely, those couple of hot weeks we endured recently, when everyone is home in the evening and air conditioners are churning. Into this mix, they've thrown intermittent wind turbines, which cannot guarantee peak generation when it's hot. It's incompetency at a nearly criminal level.

The same bureaucrats and boffins in whom we are asked to invest in this bill today back in the early 2000s projected that electricity demand would keep rising. What they didn't foresee is that energy efficiency would improve and the take-up of rooftop solar panels. The gold-plating of the grid, based on false prophecies, saw us all paying early this century for new substations and transformer upgrades, more transmission and distribution lines, investment in network reliability and redundancy, and capacity for peak demand that's rarely used.

In Australia's energy policy today, we also see another clear illustration of the need to revisit where we a federation stand as when it comes to responsibility. Energy policy is nobody's direct responsibility, just like health policy, as I find all the time as shadow assistant minister for regional health. The national energy arrangements, like the Australia Energy Regulator and the Australian Energy Market Operator, are set up under national, not federal, arrangements. Australia's energy policy is an accountability vacuum, and we all pay as a result.

The former coalition government intervened in this accountability vacuum by creating what is now known as the Australian Energy Infrastructure Commissioner. The first commissioner was Andrew Dyer. Andrew retired relatively recently from the role, and let me put on record my appreciation for his work. I connected with Andrew and, in turn, connected him with Mallee farmers and landholders who are being railroaded by Labor governments and harassed by the foreign energy cowboys Labor has enticed into regional Australia, stirring up bad blood in regional communities and families. Andrew called out those cowboys and sought greater regulation of their behaviour. This has not happened.

The unreliability of Labor's energy plan is writ large when you look at the recent collapse of a wind turbine in Berrybank, south of my electorate. These foreign energy cowboys are proposing turbines as tall as 280 metres, which is just 17 metres short of the Eureka Tower in Melbourne. Each turbine, at 280 metres tall, would clock in at number seven in the list of tallest structures in the nation, behind the Sydney and Q1 towers, Australia 108 in Melbourne and three naval communication towers.

But wait. It gets worse. A German company is planning to build a turbine 364 metres tall to the tip of its blades. If we had those in Australia, that would be the equal second-highest building in the nation. It's out of sight and out of mind from those inner-city electorates where Labor is competing against the Greens and teal candidates. Labor proposes pincushioning electorates like Mallee with massive turbines. After the Berrybank turbine collapse and other recent safety incidents, you have to ask whether turbines are safe or good for the environment—let alone the potentially devastating impact on agricultural primary industry.

Labor is happy to transform Mallee into an industrial wasteland. The Victorian government has removed from their 2022 report an item that says without offshore wind generation, Labor will need up to 70 per cent of Victoria's agricultural land for their renewable energy objectives. Don't worry: I kept a copy of the document, though they've removed it.

With offshore wind in Victoria on the rocks, you could see the wind turbine map of electorates like Mallee rapidly turning into a pincushion. Australians are feeling the pain of this reckless energy transition in their energy bills and will continue to do so. As the coalition revealed late last year, Labor's renewables-only plan will cost almost $600 billion, with the coalition's responsible energy transition being 44 per cent cheaper, at $263 billion. Moody's, late last week, confirmed Labor's energy plan could cost up to $230 billion over the next 10 years alone and drive household electricity prices up another 25 per cent in that time.

This is yet another independent warning that Chris Bowen's renewables-only approach will continue to hurt Australians, forcing families and businesses to the wall. Chris Bowen promised wholesale prices of $51 per megawatt hour in 2025, but the reality is that Australians' quarterly prices have been in excess of $100 per megawatt hour over the past year.

Energy policy failures are why regional Australians are urging their city cousins to desert the Labor-Greens-teal axis, whom, I must add, are backed by the energy barons of Climate 200, the very enablers of this destruction in not only our regional landscapes and lifestyles but our environments. I can only hope the expenditure in this bill might go towards departments and staff who will call out this nonsense on behalf of regional Australians—salt-of-the-earth, hardworking farmers like Glenden Watts, Ben Duxon, Tess Healy, Barry Batters, Gerald Feeney, Andrew Weidemann, Ross Johns and too many more to mention from my electorate who didn't choose this fight. It chose them, and they are fighting. I am fighting alongside them, and I'm grateful to Peta Credlin from Sky News for giving them a platform. I look forward to hosting Peta and shadow minister Ted O'Brien in Mallee before the election to show all Australians the human face and cost of reckless energy policy and the alternatives at our fingertips.

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