Michelle Landry (Capricornia, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That this House notes that:

(1) the Australian coal industry plays a vital role in the creation of jobs and investment in this country, particularly in central Queensland;

(2) coal-fired power stations have an ongoing role in Australia in ensuring consistent, affordable and safe supply of electricity for all Australians;

(3) while acknowledging the current and future growth of renewable energy sources in Australia, energy sourced from coal will continue to be a major contributor to our national energy output for the foreseeable future; and

(4) major resource company directors in Australia have flagged concerns that a lack of 'energy security' in Australia would make major minerals and resources projects unviable, deterring future international investment and harming jobs and growth.

We are all aware of the negative campaigns attempting to block investment of new coalmines in Australia. Today, I would like to address the impact this is having on energy security and the creation of employment opportunities, especially for my electorate of Capricornia. We need to wake up instead of get up.

Australia is leading the way internationally in clean coal technology. Black coal from Queensland is the most energy efficient in the world in terms of kinetic output per unit of coal burned. By supplying clean coal to the world, we are securing our own future while providing basic needs to the developing world with a cleaner outcome.

The Greens and lobby groups think that stopping coalmine development in Australia will resolve global environmental issues. This is like thinking you can build a house with zippy ties and sticky tape. Australia and, indeed, the world will eventually transition to new forms of energy supply. To suggest this is going to happen overnight is not only irrational but also irresponsible. The world will continue to source coal whether or not the 30 proposed coal projects in Capricornia go ahead or not. It is just that it will not be sourced from Australia. It is going to cost us jobs and it is going to cost us the environment.

This is not just about Adani, Alpha, Waratah or Hancock getting approvals. This is about ensuring Australia's own energy security in a world of growing demand. Our domestic energy supply and pricing can be supported by high-efficiency, low-emission coal-fired power generation technology. Australia can and should be leading the way in developing HELE coal-fired power plants to produce more electricity with less coal at less cost.

Around the world, over 1,200 plants are under construction—achieving over 45 per cent efficiencies. Australia has none planned. How can we, when new investment in coal is constantly delayed? We must ensure Australia's power supplies are affordable for the everyday household, and we absolutely need to ensure businesses can remain competitive on a global scale. Imagine if we turned off the coal tap tomorrow. That is 230,000 jobs gone in mining. Electricity prices soar, eliminating another 16 per cent of jobs from the construction and manufacturing sectors. With a fifth of the country out of work, the retail sector crumbles. It may sound like an exaggerated, dystopian fantasy, but this is a real outcome if we allow this country to be held hostage by the Greens and the union-backed lobby groups who support them.

On a recent trip to the Pioneer Valley in my electorate of Capricornia, a sugarcane grower told me that electricity required to pump water was costing $9 per tonne. They are considering switching to diesel. In Rockhampton, for Dobinsons Spring & Suspension, power costs have tripled in 10 years. Solar installation has helped, but it is no use for early morning furnace operations. They too are considering diesel. If companies fail, jobs for working families go with them.

I know the Greens think that the sun shines out of a different place, but the reality for business is that solar energy has to come from the sky and battery storage. The former is not reliable and the latter is currently too expensive. Businesses will look for alternatives that allow them to stay in business, and that alternative is much dirtier than clean coal; it is diesel. Anyone who has flown into Jakarta, Beijing or Bombay knows the familiar smell of diesel in the stratosphere. Is that really what Australia wants? We have to allow resource and mineral projects in Central Queensland to go ahead, and we have to develop HELE coal-fired power stations. We need to trust that the very investors in coal today will be the innovators of renewable energy tomorrow. We need to understand that Australia's coal is amongst the cleanest in the world. We will not save the environment by stopping coalmines and coal-fired power. In fact, it is quite likely to be the opposite.

Sharon Claydon (Newcastle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Is the motion seconded?

Ted O'Brien (Fairfax, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I second the motion and reserve my right to speak.

Matt Thistlethwaite (Kingsford Smith, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Coal will play a role in energy generation in Australia. But, if we are going to be honest and admit the facts, in terms of electricity generation, the role of coal will be a diminishing one. The reason for that is that coal-fired power is dirty. It is polluting and it generates carbon emissions, and over time we need to reduce those carbon emissions if we going to do justice to our kids and plan for the onslaught of climate change and for reductions in emissions. The role of government is to plan for that transition—to plan, for 20 to 30 years time, more renewables and less coal-fired power. That transition is government's role, and the plan is to make that transition as smooth as possible, particularly to reduce the adverse impact on jobs, on investment and on communities.

The one thing we can say about the Turnbull government is that they are incompetently hopeless at planning for this transition away from dirty, coal-fired power to renewables in the future. Why? Quite simply, they do not know what they want to do. One minute, the Prime Minister is for renewable energy, but the next minute, Tony Abbott makes a speech and changes his mind, and Australians are paying the price. Australians are paying the price for this government's competence and lack of a plan, through higher electricity prices. The one thing we can say with certainty is that, since the election of the Abbott-Turnbull government, electricity prices for Australian consumers are much higher. They are much higher, because the government do not have a plan for the future.

In the 1980s, when New South Wales faced blackouts, the Wran government acted and commissioned additional coal-fired power stations in Bayswater and Liddell. When they were built, the blackouts stopped. They brought on extra supply and they planned for the future. A lot of people have said: 'Why can't the government do that again? Why can't they stop these blackouts by providing more supply?' There is a reason they cannot, and that is that Liberal governments privatised the systems. They sold all of those public assets off to the private sector. In the three states where they did it, New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia, guess what? There have been blackouts and there have been higher electricity prices.

The private sector simply is not investing. I can recall, in 2007, when we went through this debate in New South Wales about electricity privatisation, and the advocates at the time saying: 'Don't worry. Don't worry. If we privatise the generators in New South Wales, the private sector will always invest. They will always bring on new capacity.' Well, guess what? We have privatised the system and they are not investing. They are not bringing on new capacity. And why would you? You would have to be nuts to invest in a new coal-fired power station in this day and age, because it is becoming an outdated technology. Where you would be investing is in renewables. If you have got any sense, you will invest in renewables, because that is where the future lies. But they are not doing that in Australia, because this government has no plan for that transition. This government has no plan for that transition, and it is affecting electricity prices. It is perfectly summed up by the Australian Energy Council's submission to the Finkel review, where they said:

… the lack of national policy certainty is now the single biggest driver of higher electricity prices.

That is the view of the people that work in the industry.

By removing a price on carbon, by reducing the RET and by ignoring the advice on the establishment of an emissions intensity scheme, the government has completely destroyed any plan for certainty of investment in renewable energy in Australia. When you get a lack of investment, you get a constraint on supply. With increasing demand, which we have seen in Australia over recent years because of the warming of the climate, you get higher prices. Constraint on supply, increasing demand, higher prices—it is simple economics. That is all because of a lack of investment to bring on that additional supply. That is ensuring that jobs are lost. That is ensuring that emissions are increasing in Australia. In Australia, over the last year or so, emissions have increased by 2.2 per cent, and investment in renewable energy has fallen. In 2014, investment in large-scale wind, solar and other clean energy sources fell, by an astounding 88 per cent, to $240 million—the lowest since 2002. It is because of this government's lack of plan and its lack of commitment to a transition to renewable energy that we are all paying the cost in higher electricity prices.

Ted O'Brien (Fairfax, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I really enjoyed that last speaker. The religious zealotry comes out, yet again, from the Labor Party whenever this topic is discussed. There were a few accusations made: one being that the government continues to change its mind, because it supports one form of energy and then another form of energy. Now, as the Prime Minister made very clear at the beginning of this year and since: this government takes an agnostic approach when it comes to energy. That means that there are times when we will support renewables, there are times when we will absolutely support wind, solar and hydro, and there are times when we will also support gas and coal.

At the end of the day, our policy objectives are crystal clear. We need to ensure that we have energy security in this country. That means that we need secure, reliable and affordable energy. The objective is clear. Our disposition, being agnostic, is clear. It differentiates us from those opposite, because our approach is a pragmatic one. It is not one based on zealotry. It is not one that says the days of coal are dead and that it is all about renewables. It is one that says that we need to ensure we have energy security and we need to ensure that we deliver against our commitments under the Paris Agreement. In order to achieve those end objectives, we are happy to accept a myriad of energy sources—coal, of course, being key to it.

What we have, and the last speaker from the opposition made it clear, is a complete ignorance of the way the real market economy works. They love to speak big about the importance of not having uncertainty in this energy marketplace; however, at that very time you have Labor state governments with unrealistic renewable energy targets which are fundamentally flawed and are a disadvantage and a disincentive for capital to flow into Australia—and, indeed, domestic companies across Australia—because of state Labor governments.

We all know the disaster, the catastrophe, that has taken place in South Australia in recent months with the blackouts. In my state—I am a proud Queenslander—the Labor government has a 50 per cent renewable energy target, which is absolutely ludicrous. Anybody who has worked in business—and admittedly, in fairness to the opposition, very rarely do they have any members in this place with business experience—or who has done any shape of economics—and again, in fairness to them, they have very few with such a background—understands the importance of leveraging your strength; leveraging your core capability. One of our strengths as a country is our resources. One of the things that has led to our economy outcompeting other economies over the years has been the fact that we leverage our strengths, we leverage our resources—and that includes coal.

Members opposite might be interested to know, because the last speaker started to talk about the importance of jobs and then said that coal was not important, that in 2014 nearly 55,000 direct jobs and 145,000 indirect jobs were created by the coal industry—let alone the role played by this industry in keeping other companies and other industries alive, allowing their economies to move forward. On top of that, what we have is an industry that also has the ability to lift people out of poverty in some emerging markets. Literally hundreds of millions of people in the world today do not have electricity, but Australian coal can solve that problem. It is for these reasons that I reject the ludicrous claims of religious zealotry from the opposition and am very happy to support this motion.

Pat Conroy (Shortland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The previous speaker shows that he has never come near a fact in his life, because you do not even have to talk about climate change to understand the economics that are confronting the power sector at the moment. I come from a proud coalmining region. Coalmining in Australia started in the Hunter Valley in 1801. We have 17,000 coalminers still in the Hunter Valley. My neighbour is a coalminer; I can see the largest coal-fired power station in the country from my front window. I am proud of our coalmining heritage, and it has a future. But those opposite are showing wilful economic ignorance when they talk about what the next generation of power production in this country is.

The truth is that our power stations are getting old very rapidly. The average age of the power fleet in New South Wales is 35 years and in Victoria it is 41 years. Thirty-three per cent of the power produced in this country comes from the Hunter Valley, and the four power stations are due to finish up in 2022, 2028, 2033 and 2035. We need alternatives very shortly. Leaving aside the cost of climate, the next coal-fired power station to be built in this country can only be built with a massive government subsidy, because coal-fired power is massively uneconomical. The levelised cost of energy production of the power station options in this country currently stands at a new black coal-fired power station being somewhere between $130 and $160 a megawatt hour—as said by Bloomberg New Energy Finance, not some mad hippie-greenie outfit. For wind it is $65—they are getting $65 a megawatt hour for wind. Large-scale PV is around $100—so it is already cheaper than coal. And rooftop photovoltaics with battery storage, providing true baseline power through solar, is only slightly above $100 an hour, according to RepuTex, and Bloomberg thinks it will be somewhere between $80 and $120 a megawatt hour by 2030. These are economic forecasters' figures—not greenies' figures. So let me repeat that: a new coal-fired power station in this country is more expensive than base load renewable and more expensive than base load gas.

The coalition do not have a clue. The coalition are economically illiterate. They are fossils. They are dinosaurs. And they are doing a great disservice to the workforce. The worst thing you can do is lie to workers, but this mob are happy to lie to workers. They are happy to go to coalminers and people who work in coal-fired power stations and say, 'Don't worry, Sunshine; you can keep doing exactly the same job for the next 50 years.' It is a great disservice to those workers and it is a great disservice to the communities like mine that rely on those jobs. It is a grubby, low act that Australians do not deserve.

We owe workers and communities like mine honesty and a plan for the future. We can have and we do need new base load power in this country, and it will be a combination of gas and—once we get through the current crisis, which this government has done nothing about but talk for the last four years—renewable energy, either base load renewable energy through concentrated solar-thermal or solar PV and storage and wind in a more intermittent variety. That combination is the future of power production in this country. Clean coal is a myth. Clean coal is a lie. The cleanest coal-fired power station in our region produces 700 kilos of carbon dioxide per megawatt hour—closed-cycle gas, 370 kilos; and renewables, obviously zero. There is no such thing as clean coal, and lying to workers and saying that this is the future for Australia is incredibly disrespectful to them and ignores the real challenges of this economy.

I am happy to debate this motion. There is only one side of politics that is operating in an air of reality in this, and that is Labor. The coalition, through ideological reasons, because they do not accept the science of climate change, or pure economic illiteracy, led by the Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce, who is a disgrace—and it is a joke that this country has an economic illiterate as the Deputy Prime Minister—are leading us down the wrong path. I am proud of Labor's climate change policies and I am proud of our energy prices. I am also proud to come from a coal region that has a bright future. But the first thing we owe communities like mine is honesty, and the coalition are just lying through their teeth.

Damian Drum (Murray, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Quite simply, the energy debate needs to be put into three very stark and very easy-to-understand categories. Firstly, as the government of the nation we need to be able to provide for our people reliable access to energy, so that the lights do not go off and so that industry can continue to do what it does for this country whenever it needs to. If that is three in the morning or four in the afternoon on a stinking hot day, we need to be able to keep the lights on and we need to be able to keep power coming through our homes, our hospitals and our industry. The second thing we need to do is to make this energy as affordable as we possibly can. We all know that, through a whole range of different reasons, the price of energy is going through the roof. The third thing we need to do is to make sure that we reach our Paris Agreement commitments. We need to be able to reduce our emissions so that we treat the environment in the same way that we treat our roadsides and our riversides. In the same way that we clean up our waterways, we also need to clean up our atmosphere. This three-pronged approach from the coalition shows that it is the only political force in this country that has a well-balanced view on this.

Right now, in 2017, to be able to provide that three-tiered approach of reliable, affordable and low-intensity-emission energy, we need to have a mix. And the mix at the moment—unfortunately for those opposite—involves a percentage of coal. Right now in Victoria over 22 per cent of our energy is being supplied by Hazelwood. You can go online and see how all eight generators at Hazelwood are firing away at near full capacity. Yet in just a couple of weeks the overseas owners, due to the Labor Party and the state government putting so much pressure on them, are simply going to pack it up and leave. What is going to happen to Victorian prices for electricity when that happens? They are going to increase anywhere from five to 15 per cent, adding another $80-odd to the family power bill. And that is not to mention what it is going to do to industry. Not only is it going to jack-up the prices; it is going to diminish the reliability of energy in this country, and industry, certainly in Victoria, has been based on cheap energy. Industry got a foothold and then retained its competitiveness on the back of cheap energy. Compared to other trading nations, we have always had high wages. However, when it comes to trade and manufacturing of the same commodities, we have always been able to argue that we have lower energy costs—and also high quality produce, specifically when it comes to food production in my electorate of Murray.

At the moment, Australia is a huge exporter of coal, the second biggest exporter of coal in the world. That is mainly black coal, but if technology continues to improve and we can work out how to dry the brown coal reserves of Gippsland, we will be sitting on a real boon for both Victoria and Australia. At the moment we are not able to do that, but there are many people working day in, day out to reach that level of balance.

As I said earlier, the latest data has shown that the coalition are well on track to meet our commitment under the Paris Agreement, which is a reduction to 26-28 per cent on 2005 levels by 2030. We are doing what we can in that space, and we need to do whatever we can in relation to reliability and cost.

Lisa Chesters (Bendigo, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This motion—and the speakers from the government—shows just how desperate those opposite are. The campaign of misinformation they are trying to run is because the big promise they made voters back in 2013 has failed. We all remember what this government said when they were in opposition: 'We'll scrap the price on carbon and your power bills will go down.' Well, they were wrong. Since they have been in government we have seen power prices go up. They told every single household and every single business in Australia a big, fat furphy when they said that scrapping the price on carbon—what they call the 'carbon tax'—would mean power prices would go down.

What we are seeing now from this government is nothing but desperation to try and cover up the dirty, big, fat furphy they told right before the 2013 campaign. The policy of state Labor governments and the Labor opposition is 50-50 renewable energy. Guess what? That also means 50 per cent base load, a mix of coal and gas—a fact that this government and the Liberal-National MPs in the chamber choose to ignore. We are talking about a mix. We are talking about transitioning to a cleaner and greener economy. We are talking about it in the way of a just transition. That is something this government do not understand.

The previous speaker talked about the shutting down of Hazelwood. Let's just talk about Hazelwood. It is an old asset that was sold by the Liberal former premier Jeff Kennett, and, as acknowledged, it is owned by overseas companies—not Victorians; overseas owners. It was always going to close, yet, rather than being proactive and supporting the workers, rather than being proactive and working with the state of Victoria, this government chose to pick a fight. Maybe that is because of the fact that they have not put enough money into transition. The state Labor government in Victoria have put almost $300 million into a fund to help that community transition so those workers can have jobs, yet this government have put very little money in of their own—in fact, only $3 million compared to the $300 million that the Labor government put in.

It does not stop there. The government has little care or regard for coalmining workers. We heard from previous speakers on this side that you must talk about the workers in coalmines, particularly the workers in Queensland. I have mentioned before in this place that we have one of the mining companies that the government is quick to defend. Anglo American have made direct employees redundant and replaced them with labour-hire workers, subcontractors. Thirty-one local workers are currently out of work, directly replaced with labour-hire workers. This is happening across the coalmining industry. We have companies very quick to cry poor and we have a government very quick to jump to their defence, but not to the defence of the people working in these industries.

Safety is becoming an issue in our mines because labour-hire workers feel scared and insecure about speaking up, because when you are a labour-hire worker you can be transferred off-site like that. They have no general protections and they have no protection from unfair dismissal, so coalminers are becoming increasingly unsafe in their environments for fear of speaking up about safety. Because of this growth in labour hire in our small towns, we are seeing the death of small towns like Middlemount. The Middlemount post office closed in 2013. There are now fears that the school will close because so many workers at the mine are now labour hire and therefore live in Rockhampton and are drive in, drive out workers. They say they cannot afford to uproot their families and bring them to Middlemount if their job will not exist tomorrow.

We also have the case of black lung—a growing crisis within our coalmining industry. More and more coalminers are being diagnosed with back lung every year. The coalmining union estimates that up to 1,000 coalminers could have black lung. These are the conditions that coalminers are working in, yet we have not heard a word from the government in speaking up for the workers in these mines. All we hear is them speaking up about company profits and coal. Sure, they make a casual link between coalmining and jobs, but they are not standing up here and defending the workers. They are not standing up here with a solution for the growing crisis with black lung disease, they are not standing up for our small towns, they are not standing up for safety and they are not standing up to ensure that workers in mines are directly employed and not facing labour hire. This government is not serious about clean energy and it is not serious about coalmining.

Rick Wilson (O'Connor, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We are here today to talk about coal. I want to reflect for a moment on the importance of coal to our society and our economy. Coal powered the Industrial Revolution. It took many societies from serfdom to the wonderful standard of living that many of us enjoy today, so I am a big supporter of coal. In 2013, we had a redistribution which brought the coalmining town of Collie into my electorate of O'Connor. O'Connor was already an electorate that represented mining interests in gold and nickel. Agriculture and tourism were the main industries, so I welcomed the addition of Collie to my electorate. They are good, hardworking people—Labor voters for the most part. I welcomed them into my electorate and I am determined to look after them. As the member for Bendigo said earlier, it is all about looking after the people who live in our small towns.

I also want to touch on the energy mix in Western Australia. At the moment, as we can see on the AEMO website, currently 13 per cent of Western Australia's power is generated by wind, 49 per cent is generated by coal, with most coming out of the town of Collie, and 37 per cent is generated by gas. When I looked the other afternoon, the amount of generation from wind was zero. There was no wind blowing, so the energy mix saw gas and coal having to step up to fill the baseload requirement. We need to bear this in mind. The previous speaker talked about baseload renewable energy. I am looking forward to seeing some facts around that baseload renewable energy. Anyway, we also heard about consultant reports and modelling that talked about renewable energy being cheaper than coal fired power or gas. That may well be the case when the wind is blowing, but at the end of the day you still have to have the baseload capacity ready to go when the wind drops off, and that is the fundamental issue.

As I said, we have heard about modelling and consultants reports and we have heard other experts talk about the various costs. As all of us in this place get lobbied by all sides and we see reports written with one point of view or another in mind, but let us look at a real-life example. South Australian Premier Mike Rann referred to South Australia as an experiment, or the canary in the coalmine. South Australia has pushed its renewable energy component up to a theoretical 41 per cent of the state's electricity supply. I do not think I need to remind everyone in this place of the disaster that has been. We saw massive power blackouts, costing, I think, business in South Australia around $110 million to $120 million. We have seen small businesses paying increases in their power bills of up to 75 per cent just in the last 12 months. We all remember the celebration of the South Australian government when the Port Augusta power plant was demolished. 'What a great day for the state,' the South Australian government said. But, since then, we have seen that Arrium, the steel producer, is looking at removing its business from South Australia, and other major businesses are looking to move on.

On the weekend before last in Western Australia, we had a new Labor government elected. I congratulate them and I hope they are a very good government. Let us look at what Western Australian Labor were talking about just a few weeks before the election. According to The Australian, the Labor energy spokesperson, Bill Johnston, told the National Environmental Law Association on 27 October, in answer to a question about whether WA should have its own renewable energy target:

The Labor Party's target is at least 50 per cent by 2030. We don't believe that that is going to push up prices because we believe it will be done on a competitive basis and, as I say, I think setting a target leads to policy action and I think there are a lot of policy actions that are required.

That is what Mr Johnston said, but, importantly, this is what the re-elected Labor member for Collie-Preston, Mick Murray, thinks. Once again, I quote The Australian and an article written by Andrew Burrell:

Labor abandoned plans to unveil a 50 per cent renewable energy target in Western Australia after Mick Murray—the party's veteran MP in the coalmining town of Collie—threatened to quit his marginal seat before next week's state election.

…   …   …

It is understood Mr Murray had heated discussions with Labor energy spokesman Bill Johnston and others in the party who … would have set a 50 per cent renewable energy target for WA …

I look forward to working with Mick Murray to oppose the federal Labor Party's 50 per cent target. (Time expired)

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

I thank the member for Capricornia for this excellent opportunity to express my concerns and, indeed, the concerns of my constituents regarding the Adani Carmichael coalmine and this government's irresponsible attack on renewables in pursuit of its love affair with coal. This government's fascination with jobs in the present economy does, of course, have its virtues, but, when it considers the public policy question around energy policy and coal, this government approaches the issues with the zealotry and single-mindedness of it being a religious war rather than it being a considered public policy debate trying to search for the best and most economic solutions for our country. As the contribution from the last speaker exemplifies, for the government this is a zero-sum game. This is good versus evil. This is coal versus evil imitators. This is not a government searching for an evidence based and sensible approach that would best advantage this country. In fact, it amazes me that every time a member of this government seeks to once again praise the future of coal—by bringing into this place, for instance, for a nationwide show-and-tell a lump of coal—they continue to float irresponsible and absurd claims about renewable energies. Every year when we are breaking records when it comes to extreme weather events in Australia and our Pacific neighbours are under immediate threat from rising sea levels—and we know things will continue to get worse until we do something decisive about it—from this government we see, at best, in its most glorious moments, mere inaction, and more often we see nothing less than absolute sabotage, partisan attacks on renewable energy and partisan attacks on measures that are aimed to reduce and tackle climate change.

In relation to Adani, one of the key objections expressed by my constituents is the proposal to use large amounts of government money to prop up that project. Reportedly, the project requires up to $1 billion in federal funds so as to make it a viable project. We know already that 74 per cent of Australians oppose that kind of use of public sector moneys. It is not just controversial, it is ridiculous, that Australian taxpayers should be forking out moneys on that scale to prop up a project when investment in the renewable energy sector is not only good for the environment but it is good for jobs, good for the economy and good for the future economy of this country.

I appreciate the member for Capricornia's concern for job creation. It should be and is the proper focus for every member of this place and every government. But that is why I find it so hypocritical that this government can continue to shout about jobs and growth while they ensure that Australia misses out on the economic opportunities of the global renewable energy boom. This government's attack on the renewable energy industry, most recently on display in South Australia, has had dire consequences for jobs and it has stymied the growth of an industry while the rest of the world has been reaping the economic benefits. This year alone, the Turnbull government's attacks on renewable energy have led to the loss of 2,150 jobs in the renewable sector. This brings the total number of job losses from renewable energy under the Abbott-Turnbull governments to 5,720. That is one in three jobs in this sector that have been lost under the watch of this government. In fact, when it comes to the energy debate, this government are real live job killers. Meanwhile, globally, renewable energy jobs have grown by 45 per cent around the world. Here we are contracting at a time when this industry is starting to take off globally. If we were making the most of this global growth rate, rather than squandering it since 2013, there would be 24,000-plus jobs here in Australia rather than the 11,000 we have present. That is an opportunity cost this government's policy—this government's rear-vision mirror image of this industry—is costing us right now.

Ironically enough, in recent days we saw ARENA—an entity that this government has twice tried to abolish—now saddled with the task of undertaking a feasibility study for an expansion of the Snowy River project, a project that the Liberal Party boycotted the opening of many moons ago. This media stunt, these pseudo-events, these partisan, crusader-like attacks on renewable energies are nothing more than an inexplicable ideological obsession that defies evidence based, sensible public policy and is costing us jobs now. It is costing our economy now. It is all well and good to put forward a motion talking about the importance of job creation and energy security, but if you ignore on purely partisan grounds or inexplicable— (Time expired)

Ms Catherine King (Ballarat, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Health) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The time allotted for this debate has expired. The debate is adjourned on the resumption of the debate will be made an order of the day for the next sitting.