Susan Templeman (Macquarie, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Last Saturday, Richmond, in my electorate of Macquarie, came within 0.6 of a degree of being officially the hottest place on the planet, with a temperature of 47 degrees. Unofficially, our own thermometers hovered between 48 and 49 degrees, and mine hit that repeatedly as I drove along the base of the Blue Mountains from Bligh Park. The only thing on the minds of parents with young kids, the aged and the unwell was, 'How do we stay cool?' And no doubt being able to have air conditioners, fans and cool drinks was a big part of helping to stay cool—all of which, of course, require electricity. The combination of energy security and reducing the carbon emissions that will keep contributing to ever-increasing extreme days is the dual challenge that we face.

So this week, as I watched the Prime Minister say on TV that he had never claimed renewable energy was to blame for the power crisis in South Australia, I was stunned. I sat directly opposite him in question time last week and watched the words come out of his mouth when he said that South Australia had:

… pursued utterly unrealistic, unaffordable renewables targets without giving any thought to what their consequences will be for the grid, for households …

The Prime Minister explained in 2010 that Australia needed to move to a 'situation where all or almost all of our energy comes from zero- or very near zero-emission sources' to avoid the risks, laid out in the science, of catastrophic climate change. But on 7.30 this man was now saying:

These intermittent renewables do pose real challenges.

The Prime Minister said these words, words that he has this week back-pedalled on in a pitiful way. He reminds me of the cheating boyfriend who has been caught out and says: 'No, I didn't do that. I didn't say that.' This is not Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four; the Prime Minister cannot just pretend he did not say these things. We know that renewables were not to blame for the South Australian blackouts.

The Prime Minister's own department had a 5 am phone hook-up the morning of his comments on renewables, where it was stated that the blackout occurred because of miscalculations and the falling over of transmission towers. In New South Wales, we almost had a blackout last weekend, and we have the lowest percentage of renewable energy in the country.

Really what the government is missing here is that this is an opportunity to harness the emerging technologies around things such as battery storage, which will allow us to have a more secure supply, be less dependent on coal in the future and be less subject to price spikes but also build an industry and could generate jobs, including in my electorate. But the government needs to accept that it must have a transition plan that provides investment certainty and that addresses the realities of the world in which we now live.