Scott Buchholz (Wright, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It's an absolute privilege to follow the member for Mallee. I want to affirm the comments made in this chamber by the member for Mallee and the way she has articulated some of the failings of this government, as set out in this legislation.

For a starting point, I want to put on the record that there are those in this place that start their assumptions of the Liberal Party with none of us believing in renewable energy. Well, I shared this story with my colleagues before the debate started. I live in a regional precinct, and I had a journalist here in Canberra once say to me, 'When are you guys'—meaning the Liberal Party—'going to get on board with renewable energy?' You should have seen their face change—and it really gave light to what the Canberra bubble is—when I explained to them that I live in a regional area and that they would be hard pressed to find a single farm that did not have a windmill on it supplied by a company called Southern Cross Windmills. Their head office is situated in my electorate, and this year they are celebrating 150 years of manufacturing, making us the early adopters of renewable energy. When those windmills failed and we had to adopt new technologies, do you know what the technology was that most farmers went to? It was solar panels to run little Honda motor pumps to pump water for stock and for irrigation to provide the protein, to provide the fibre, to provide the vegetables—the food that goes on the plates of Australians. We were the early adopters.

I can tell the Labor Party something for nothing. If you want people to get on board with renewable energy, then you're doing exactly the wrong thing by making it even more expensive to use renewable energy. We were told on more than 200 occasions by those on the other side that under a Labor government power prices would be $275 cheaper—that the wind blew for free and that the sunshine was free. They led people along, led the Australian people along, on the understanding that their power prices would go down. With the members in this chamber at the moment I could do a straw poll and ask them to think of their last electricity bill. I know what mine was. My electricity bill at home was over $2½ thousand for the quarter. Go back three years when Labor was first elected, when we left office, the same power bill was 1,200 bucks. That's my household. I challenge—

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