James Stevens (Sturt, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Government Waste Reduction) Share this | Hansard source

I appreciate the opportunity to further contribute to the excellent points made by my friend the member for Wannon. He articulated at the end of his comments there the South Australian perspective of the Albanese government's now abandoned plans for offshore wind zones in South Australia. Indeed, it was the Labor Premier of South Australia, Peter Malinauskas, that turned his back on the federal Labor government's energy policy position—not just on this issue, I might add. He's a very pro-nuclear guy, Peter Malinauskas. He likes nuclear. He wants nuclear submarines in Adelaide. He thinks nuclear is safe. I think he has got to be a little bit loyal to his party and has to watch his words, but I think he'd be a very excited partner.

A division having been called in the House of Representatives—

Sitting suspended from 16:59 to 17:19

I think I was just making the point, before the bells went, that the South Australian Labor Premier, Peter Malinauskas, joined many others in opposing the South Australian component of the designated wind farm zone that Minister Bowen sought to create. As I was saying, there couldn't be a starker difference between the South Australian Labor Premier and the federal Labor energy minister when it comes to matters of the energy future for this country. The Premier in South Australia has been very open-minded on nuclear and very keen to embrace the opportunities of the AUKUS submarine agreement for Adelaide. In fact, you'd think it was his idea from the way he discusses it and talks about it as his own. He's made many comments over the years in support of considering civilian nuclear generation to be a part of the mix in South Australia and Australia as a whole. Indeed, I strongly suspect that, if we win the election in the coming months, the South Australian government will be a very willing partner in discussions about nuclear in South Australia.

He's also probably pretty unpopular with Minister Bowen because the South Australian Labor government are extremely embracing of natural gas as an important fuel source for our energy grid well into the future. Of course, the Moomba gas fields that straddle the South Australia-Queensland border are a vitally significant industry for South Australia. The only ASX 100 listed company that's headquartered in Adelaide is Santos, who, of course, have a decades-long history of extracting gas from Moomba and piping it down to the rest of South Australia—and, of course, now there's also a pipeline that goes to Gladstone in Queensland.

So the Labor Premier in South Australia is not very much in tune with this federal Labor government. The Western Australian Premier, equally, is not very much in tune with this government on energy issues or issues of environmental red tape. I suppose they still have Jacinta Allan, the Victorian Premier, to hang out with if they choose to do so in the upcoming campaign. All strength to their arm on that. Maybe the one person who, when standing next to the Prime Minister, would enable him to feel that he is not the more unpopular of the two would be the Victorian Premier. 'Least worst'—what a slogan! There's a TV ad in that, I think: 'It could be worse.'

We're debating a bill that is a clean-up job for this government on significant flaws in legislation that have been revealed through a judicial decision. We in the coalition are very uncomfortable with the retrospectivity principles of this, on top of the policy principles of where this government is taking us. They went to the last election and said power prices were going to drop by $275. Poor old RepuTex! I hope they've changed their name and got a new website, because their name is absolute mud. They are the company that did the costings on Labor's $275 energy saving, and you wouldn't want to engage them for anything given what would happen when you google their name now, after they had their credibility completely destroyed by Minister Bowen and this federal Labor government's energy plan, which has delivered anything but cost savings for Australian families.

Hydrogen, regrettably, is coming unstuck all across the country, and I think that the South Australian government will very shortly announce that their hydrogen plant is miraculously going to become a natural gas plant. They've already softened this up through local media coverage, saying that the steelworks situation in Whyalla means that maybe their $600 million hydrogen plant, which would definitely be more than $1 billion now, isn't viable—not that that was ever the reason they gave for undertaking this hydrogen investment in the upper Spencer Gulf. They've been briefing out to the media that the turbines that they've purchased, which were going to run the hydrogen generation, can have natural gas as an alternate fuel source to hydrogen. They haven't purchased any electrolysers yet. That's lucky—if they're not going ahead with this hydrogen plant—that they haven't been saddled with the huge cost of electrolysers.

It's very conveniently looking like the South Australian government are going to be abandoning hydrogen, which is in line with everyone else in this country that is abandoning hydrogen, which this government says is an integral part of their future vision for the energy needs of this country. Whether it's offshore wind or the $1½ trillion worth of transmission lines, which we don't want to see built—happily for the communities that will be affected, we've got such an incompetent government that they can't even successfully roll out an unpopular policy like $1½ trillion worth of transmission. But it will probably ultimately come if we don't get rid of this awful government and their dangerous energy policies.

On all of the metrics that they were meant to hit when it comes to their energy vision for our future, they're failing. On some, we're lucky that they're failing, through incompetence. Of course, Australian families have been deeply, deeply let down by their failure to achieve the central promise of their energy policy plan, which was cutting household bills by $275—a confirmed failure. So many families and so many businesses are now almost frightened to open that bill that they get in the mail with their energy retailer's logo in the corner. Some retailers might want to take their logo off just so there's a better chance of people opening their mail because of that bill shock that you get when you open your electricity bill, under a government that said it was going to cut your bill by $275, and you suddenly find you've got to cancel the family holiday that you've done every year on that long weekend to the caravan park by the sea. You've got to pay your electricity bills, you've got to pay your rent or mortgage, you've got to provide for your family, and you've got to pay the grocery bills. It's that discretionary expenditure—the things that people look forward to and enjoy—that they're having to cut out of their household budget.

It's no wonder that we're seeing this anger, particularly in parts of Australia that are doing it the most tough, because this is not the life that they thought they were getting by voting for this Labor government. They shouldn't be mocked for thinking it was safe to trust Labor and that they wouldn't blatantly lie about cutting your electricity bill. We should live in a society where, when people that aspire to be prime minister of this country say something like: 'Vote for me. I've got a costed policy here with good old RepuTex—so it's got a big stamp on the side saying, "This thing can be relied upon",' it's not unreasonable for people to think, 'I'm sure he couldn't possibly lie to us about something like that and I would like my electricity bill to drop by $275.' People would've fallen for that, and it's a great disgrace and a shame on those that perpetrated that fraud on the people of Australia that they were misled to that extent.

We've made it very clear that we have a very different vision for our energy future, one that people can count on and rely on, one that has been properly costed, one that is credible and is being pursued around the world by every advanced economy except ours—funnily, because we've got the largest uranium deposits on the planet. In fact, in my home state of South Australia, we have the largest uranium mine at Olympic Dam, run by BHP. Of course, we have not had a civilian nuclear generation industry until Peter Dutton, the opposition leader, and the coalition said: 'This has to be the future for our nation. This will bring us the security and reliability we need. This will give confidence to investors to invest in our economy, to set up businesses here and to bring businesses here knowing that there's a reliability of energy, one of the vital inputs to our economic recipe.'

Going to the people of Sturt, like my other coalition colleagues and candidates will be doing, we have a solution to this Labor mess. The bill before us is a great example of the chaos that energy policy in this country is in under our Prime Minister and under this Labor government. It has to come to an end, which is why we've made the very deliberate decision to put the most comprehensive energy plan out in the public domain with all the detail that people need to understand it properly. It's there to be scrutinised—very unsuccessfully from those who have tried so far, I might add—a plan that will achieve our commitment to net zero by 2050. I echo our shadow energy minister—it will be very hard to get to net zero by 2050 with nuclear; it'll be impossible to do without it. No-one on the planet has a credible plan to get to net zero by 2050 without nuclear, not a single person.

Apparently, our Prime Minister and energy minister know better than everyone else. We know what their track record is because we can see it in that $275 electricity saving that they achieved for every household in this country. We oppose this bill. We more broadly oppose the chaos of energy policy in this country under this government. Thankfully for the people of Australia, there is an election coming within months, if not weeks. It's a great chance to get our country back on track, to get our energy policy back on track and to bring certainty, reliability and stability to Australian families and Australian businesses. I urge the House to defeat this bill.

See this speech in context