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

As I rise to speak on the Electricity Infrastructure Legislation Amendment Bill 2025, I reflect on where I am standing: the Federation Chamber, the chamber where non-controversial bills land and where non-controversial speeches are made, apparently. The shadow minister for climate change and energy earlier challenged why this bill is being sent to this chamber, which was used for covert purposes earlier in this parliamentary session in Labor's hope that the media weren't watching. Newsflash: they probably are. There's no press gallery here, but I can assure you the Australian public are watching this government very closely on energy policy. They are watching failure after failure from the Albanese Labor government to deliver the $275 reduction in their power prices, which was promised 97 times to help Mr Albanese get into the Lodge.

Labor's energy approach comes at five times the cost Australians were initially promised. Australians are watching quarterly wholesale prices rise to a level of over $100 per megawatt hour, when Minister Bowen promised that wholesale prices would be just $51 per megawatt hour. Wholesale prices skyrocketed 83 per cent in the past year, with record highs in New South Wales and Queensland. So what was Labor's 2022 pre-election energy modelling? Perhaps it was complete and utter fantasy. Perhaps they accepted their modelling from their cowboy mates in the foreign owned wind turbine industry, for goodness-knows-what benefit to everyday Australians.

So we come to this bill, and the shadow minister mentioned in the House a 'protection racket'. He asked, 'Why is this government running a protection racket?' When you consider that the majority, if not all, of both the offshore and onshore wind turbine proponents are foreign owned, you have to ask if the Albanese government is acting in the national interest. Why are foreign owned energy companies acting like cowboys across Australia, dividing communities with sham consultations, as the member for Wannon said earlier? Why the haste to put this retrospective legislation through the parliament in what may well be the dying days of the Albanese Labor government?

Labor still hasn't told us how much offshore wind will cost or how much it will cost on our power bills. Given their track record, either they don't know or they don't care, as long as their cowboy mates in the foreign owned wind turbine industry get to railroad regional communities. You only need to look at their form—not only in my electorate of Mallee, as I was saying earlier this sitting week on the appropriation bill and Victorian Labor's fast-tracking of regulations to turn my electorate into a pincushion of wind turbine projects and a spider's web of transmission lines on prime agricultural land.

On transmission lines, let me add that there are people with very interesting lives who listen to parliament and are listening right now. One took it upon themselves to write to me, responding to my earlier speech this week, saying, 'Nuclear energy will require transmission lines just like wind turbines do.' No, that's incorrect. The coalition's policy is to establish nuclear energy facilities to support energy jobs at existing coal-fired power sites in the existing transmission network. That's the nonsense that those opposite—and their ideological friends in the Greens and Climate 200-backed teals—propagate in Australia. They gaslight Australians that regional people want wind turbines. When you actually ask regional people, farmers facing the imposition of wind turbines, their answer is a 90 per cent no, they don't. That is a fact. Nuclear will not require the 28,000 kilometres of transmission lines across regional Australia that Labor is proposing.

This is a government waging an ideological war on coal and gas, offering damp squibs to coal and gas miners and workers—for instance, proposing coal-fired workers in the Hunter Valley be re-employed making solar panels.  Never mind, that's in Labor's la-la land, where China already dominates the market and nobody in business would go anywhere near trying to take China on without serious subsidies. Labor has weakened the energy grid and Australians are being forced to rely on expensive unreliable renewables without the necessary firming power. Labor has no plan for affordability, no plan for reliability, and certainly no plan to keep the lights—and Aussie families are paying the price. It's time to embrace a balanced energy mix as a cheap, clean and consistent path forward.

I surveyed thousands of voters in my Mallee electorate and asked, 'Do you support extracting more gas for use in Australia?' This is in Victoria, remember, where the Andrews and Allan Labor governments cripple investment and exploration for gas. Over two-thirds of Mallee voters—68.6 per cent—said, yes, they support extracting more gas for use in Australia. Just 15.7 per cent said no. Incidentally, 46.5 per cent of respondents said that Australia's carbon emissions reduction targets are too high, and 62.5 per cent said they were likely to support nuclear power, like small modular reactors, as part of Australia's future energy mix. This is Australians talking. When asked whether they thought our energy system should prioritise reducing emissions, ensuring electricity is affordable or ensuring reliable supply, 57 per cent backed affordability. I don't think this Labor government gets it.

The Australian people are not mugs, but Labor is trying to take the Australian public for mugs. Australians see their power bills going up, they listen to the energy minister, Chris Bowen, say that renewables are the cheapest form of electricity, and they laugh. It's not, 'Ha ha, that's a funny joke.' It's a nervous laugh, which would be funnier if it weren't so painful. This government is a joke, but it's not the funny kind; it's the sick joke kind. I can tell you that Mallee voters cannot wait to render their verdict at the ballot box.

It gets worse, though. This vindictive brand of Labor that we currently have at federal and Victorian levels takes the insult one further. They determined that Mallee would be the state's primary renewable energy zone. There were going to be six REZs—renewable energy zones—but three of them suddenly vanished. Two others are in Mallee, and the other will point the foreign owned wind turbine cowboys to Wannon. But the big purple patch on the Labor REZ map is absolutely Mallee. 'Go bulldoze your way through Mallee,' they tell the foreign owned wind turbine cowboys. 'Pretend you care, but go your hardest. Conduct a fig leaf consultation, but, hey, we've got your back. We'll fast-track the laws; we'll have sham environmental approvals so you can get through.' Why? We know there is a rush for Labor's political target, a hypothetical emissions reduction target that is hurting every Australian in their power bills—a mad rush to a renewables future because Labor have thrown dirt in the face of coal and gas and said, 'Get out of our country!' 'Nick off,' they say. 'We've got abundant wind and solar.'

There's one problem. The wind doesn't blow at the precise moment everyone has their air conditioners on in the peak of summer when the sun has gone down. It's very thoughtless of the sun and wind to do that—to not shine and blow when Labor want them to for their supposedly green dreams! I can picture the minister, frustrated by the setting sun, saying, 'How will renewables be the cleanest form of energy if you keep going down all the time?' It's like King Canute yelling at the tide, a footnote in history. King Canute was actually trying to demonstrate that his power had limits and that nature, or God in his context, had a supremacy he could not counteract. But not the Albanese government, not the energy minister—they'll yell that renewables are the cheapest form of electricity, because they hope that, if they say it enough, the lie will become the truth.

I want to commend my colleague the member for Nicholls for moving a bill, the Requiring Energy Infrastructure Providers to Obtain Rehabilitation Bonds Bill 2024. The premise of the bill is a simple one. I have mentioned energy cowboys, the foreign owned companies that come and build projects. But who knows if they'll still be around to clean up the mess if they've gone broke, leaving these huge turbines in the ground, rusting away. Let's remember that the onshore turbines proposed for my electorate are at this stage potentially up to 280 metres high, 17 metres short of the Eureka Tower in Melbourne, one of Australia's tallest buildings. As I said earlier this week in the House, there's a turbine over 350 metres high proposed for Germany right now, which, if built here in Australia, would make it one of the nation's tallest constructions.

These energy cowboys, foreign owned companies, want to put massive turbines offshore. It seems to me that the member for Nicholls's bill—and I disclose an interest, a very passionate and strong interest, in the genesis of that bill—is a perfectly reasonable proposition. If you're putting gigantic infrastructure on Australian shores, you need to put down the money to show you'll rehabilitate them when they are finished. Nobody has a crystal ball, and it's fanciful to suggest that, in decades or centuries to come, wind turbines will be a permanent fixture in our oceans, mountains and landscapes. They will become redundant and they will need to be removed. Requiring a rehabilitation bond is surely environmentally responsible.

The political children on the crossbench, principally the Greens, like to hop up and down and demand that miners rehabilitate land if mines go ahead. We have state laws that require that rehabilitation. It is the law of the land. Yet somehow if it's an energy project, such as wind turbines, no, the Greens go missing. Don't impose environmental rehabilitation requirements on wind projects! God forbid! As one older lady said at a public meeting I attended in Warracknabeal in my electorate, admitting she's not a very good shot, if a farmer shot an eagle they would be prosecuted, yet somehow, if a wind turbine chops one up, that's good for the environment, or it's okay with the activists.

Let's not forget that popular Counting Crows song, often wistfully sung by would-be environmentalists, bemoaning that 'they paved paradise and put up a parking lot'. Well, in my electorate of Mallee, they're wrecking paradise and building a very large pincushion, a pincushion of wind turbines, to punish Mallee voters for having the common sense to see Labor's energy pipedream for what it is. Labor are punishing the sensible Australians who yelled to the emperor that he isn't wearing any clothes and throwing them in the political clink. That's the nasty, vindictive behaviour by Labor in Mallee. Labor intend to punish regional Australians for supporting a sensible approach to energy policy, all so Labor can keep living their out-of-sight out-of-mind wind turbine fantasies in the inner cities.

I commend Peta Credlin from Sky News, and the Weekly Times for sharing my constituents' stories. Come out and take a look at the industrial wasteland Labor is creating on our paradise—our Grampians, our Wimmera plains and our Gannawarra wetlands. Australian voters can't wait for the election, and neither can I. Bring it on.

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