Rowan Ramsey (Grey, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

That was a disgraceful performance by the member for Charlton, who well knows his government did not order one ship in six years. If you want to know how to engineer a valley of death in shipbuilding, it is by ordering no ships. It is disgraceful.

Tonight I want to round off an issue that I have spoken on a couple of times in the last two weeks and have not had the opportunity to flesh out. Unfortunately, I had to give up some time to the member for Charlton because I could not stand the Australian public to be so badly misled. Unfortunately, we heard that Alinta will be closing the Flinders power stations some time between March next year and 2018. I hope it is the later date. Unfortunately, this is the ultimate, predictable and I guess intended consequence of the renewable energy scheme that got in front of itself. Instead of supplying the new electricity load to Australia in an expanding market it has been subsidised to build electricity into a decreasing market, which has led to over generation. The baseload generators are at the bottom of the feed chain.

Tonight I want to focus on the consequences and the possible way ahead for the town of Leigh Creek and the city of Port Augusta. Last week was Local Government Week and I had the Mayor of Port Augusta here with his CEO. We organised meetings with a number of ministers, including Ian Macfarlane, the Minister for Industry and Science. Leigh Creek is a government town, owned by the South Australian government—a town of about 500 people, really created solely for coalmining. If it were to lose 253 jobs, it basically would lose its reason for existence. But in the time that it has been there, of course, it has become more than just a coal supply town. It provides jobs and supplies the local pastoral industry. It has also become an important tourism step as people work their way into what is absolutely the outback of South Australia, or the outback of Australia. There is a very good school in Leigh Creek. I see the town surviving, but it will be in a smaller shape. There are some good prospects in the area. There is talk now of coal gasification. There is also an iron ore deposit in the area. It is not easy to get an iron ore project up at the moment, but of course there is a very good railway line there, so perhaps there are some synergies that will show themselves.

In Port Augusta, following the meetings I had with the council, there were a number of issues raised that I had not even considered. For instance, there is a lake on the south of town in which the water is supplied by the heating ponds and the overflow from the power station; it is above sea level. It is called Bird Lake because there are lots of birds on it. It has been landscaped and there are birdwatching facilities. Of course, if there is no power station, the lake dries up and becomes basically a stinking mess on the southern side of Port Augusta. We cannot allow that to happen. The council will lose $500,000 worth of rates a year from the closure of Alinta. The council will see a loss of sales of land that they had intended to make into what was a growing city. We can hardly expect it to keep growing at the moment. A hundred and eighty-five jobs are being lost in Port Augusta, and they are pretty well-paying jobs too.

There are some very bright spots around Port Augusta—including Sundrop Farms, which will be employing over 200 people in the next 12 months using solar desalination to grow truss tomatoes for the Coles supermarket chain on a 10-year contract. That is a very exciting prospect, and they are looking to use that as a training base for the world. I have also been having discussions with SolarReserve, the latest company to build a solar concentrated power station in Nevada. They are interested in constructing in the area. In fact, they have bought land.

So there are some possibilities and things in the pipeline, and I guess it is my job as the member for Grey to make sure that the doors to the federal government and to the ministers are open for the proponents of these schemes and others. The mayor tells me there has already been interest in the Alinta site. I do not know what those industries are, but he said he has had discussions with some already. So my door is open. I will open up the doors to the ministers so the people who have plans for Port Augusta can get to the government and get a deal.