David Feeney (Batman, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Justice) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

  Over Christmas we saw the release of a damning report—a report that confirmed that carbon pollution levels under this government were not only rising, but that they would continue to rise for the foreseeable future.    Bizarrely, pollution results under Mr Malcolm Turnbull, as Prime Minister, have been even worse than the results under Prime Minister Tony Abbott. This government's only answer to addressing the challenges of climate change has been the absurd proposal to build more coal-fired power plants when the rest of the world is investing in renewable energy. We have seen renewable energy under this government go backwards at an alarming rate. Some 3,000 jobs have been lost, while in the rest of the world this industry has continued to grow.

The energy industry, broader Australian industry as well as energy experts have made it clear: new coal-fired power stations are more expensive, dirtier and less flexible than all of the other alternatives. One of the world's most respected energy analysts, Bloomberg New Energy Finance, have stated that these proposed new coal-fired power stations would increase energy prices. Such is the state of the international market that coal-fired power stations struggle to get the investment required to make them viable. It is a damning indictment of the government's clean coal debacle that Professor Clive Hamilton from Charles Sturt University tendered his resignation from the Climate Change Authority in disgust—and, I might say, his resignation letter is a searing read.

This new thought bubble by the Turnbull government is just a right-wing-approved distraction from the fact that those opposite have no plan to deal with the challenges confronting the electricity sector and that they lack the courage and vision to develop one.    This week we saw the Turnbull government double down on its fraud on the electorate, asserting that the South Australian blackouts were the result of the renewables mix. We know of course that this is a nonsense. A careful and prudent study of the facts tells us that the failure to apply the required available reserve energy meant that increased demand in South Australia brought about a collapse and a blackout. It had nothing whatsoever to do with the energy mix. Yet this remarkable untruth is being propagated with such force by this government, because it wants to make sure that the people of Australia are not looking at the true causes—the true causes being a government that has no answers to the great questions of our time.

Not only has it been shown that the Prime Minister ignored official advice that renewable energy was not to blame, he completely ignored the fact that load shedding occurred in New South Wales, a jurisdiction with one of the highest reliance on coal in the world at 82 per cent. The way forward is renewable energy. The way forward is a national electricity sector plan that sees our economy transition. (Time expired)