Warren Snowdon (Lingiari, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for External Territories) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

You look as if you own that position, Deputy Speaker Freelander! Onto serious matters—not that you're not serious.

Here we are, two weeks away from Glasgow, a great and very important climate change conference, and we're in disarray about whether or not we've got an emissions target of zero by 2050. This is largely due to disarray within the coalition, and mostly because of the pig-headedness of some in the National Party. As a party to the Paris Agreement, we're meant to be going to Glasgow with concrete improvements to our emissions reduction schedule. I've not heard one word from the government about what that might look like. Indeed, we should be going to talk about our 2030 pledge of 26 to 28 per cent, which we'll meet walking in our sleep. Instead of reviewing that and giving us a greater pledge for 2030, we're hearing nothing from the government in that regard. We'll get to hear about a target of 2050, I am imagining. We'll have some people from the National Party continuing to bleat about regional Australia when in fact there are many in regional Australia who want this debate over and done with. They understand its implications.

Every state and territory, most of our major businesses, the National Farmers Federation, the Business Council of Australia, the Minerals Council, APPEA—all of these groups are now committed to zero emissions by 2050. They want a way forward and they understand the importance to their industries of climate change and doing something effective. We all know that net zero is not just an environmental imperative but an investment framework to guide decisions by business and policy from governments.

As I said, every state and territory has an emissions target of zero by 2050. This government can't bring itself to show the leadership that's required to show us what that pathway might look like. It's not surprising in that context that the world is wondering what we're up to. For the world, the next decade will determine whether warming can be kept to 1.5 or 2 degrees. It's imperative that we show some leadership in this debate and not be just a follower. For Australia, the next decade will determine whether we become a renewable energy superpower or lose the global race that is already underway.

We hear a lot about regional Australia from the National Party. I haven't heard them spruik the importance of using our solar resources as an export commodity. But in the Northern Territory there is an ambitious project taking shape to supply solar sourced electricity into the Singapore market, which is currently dependent on gas fired power. Sun Cable's vision is to build the world's first intercontinental power grid connecting Australia to Singapore to supply 24/7 renewable power. Sun Cable is a private Australian solar energy infrastructure developer, and we know that Australia has the highest per capita solar resource in the G20 and the second highest in the world. There is unique opportunity to export large volumes of renewable energy, supporting regional energy needs and sustaining economic growth. There's no reason why we shouldn't be making sure that we are exporting this power into South-East Asia. This is exactly what Sun Cable is doing. The Australia-Asia PowerLink is expected to channel renewable electricity to a solar battery in Darwin, the world's largest solar battery, before travelling by submarine cable 3,750 kilometres to Singapore. If the project goes to plan—and there is no reason why it shouldn't—it will provide Singapore with up to 15 per cent of its electricity needs from 2028.

Sun Cable's $30 billion Australia-Asia PowerLink project includes a 17- to 20-gigawatt solar farm and a battery on a remote pastoral station about 70 kilometres south-east of Elliott, at Powell Creek. Elliott, as you may know, Mr Deputy Speaker Freelander, is a township around 250 kilometres north of Tennant Creek and 636 kilometres south of Darwin, and to the west, I might say, of the Beetaloo Basin, which is, of course, a major gas resource. The solar farm will be enormous, covering 12,000 hectares—imagine, Mr Deputy Speaker—or 125 square kilometres. The electricity generated at the storage facility will be transmitted overhead to Darwin and then via the undersea cable from Darwin Harbour to Singapore.

These projects don't happen overnight, Mr Deputy Speaker, as you well know, but slowly the boxes are being ticked, with the prospect that this project will start construction in late 2023, with electricity commissioned for Darwin by 2026, and transmission to Darwin by 2026 and Singapore in 2027. To say this will be a boon to northern Australia is putting it lightly. To say that it will be a boon to the Northern Territory economy is putting it lightly—a regional economy. Whilst the National Party are contemplating their navels, the world is getting on with business. Sun Cable has now announced that it has received crucial approval from the Indonesian government to allow an undersea cable to run through its territorial waters to Singapore. This is a major change. The storage system, as I said, described as the world's largest battery, has the goal of storing between 36 and 42 gigawatt hours. It's estimated the project will inject $8 billion into the Australian economy, with most of it being spent in the Northern Territory, a regional part of Australia. Sun Cable have lodged a development application with the Development Consent Authority in the Northern Territory. The development proposal is also for a manufacturing facility that will pilot a semiautomated production line manufacturing MAVERICK solar array systems in Darwin. So not only are we getting this huge solar farm in the centre of the Northern Territory; there will be a manufacturing base in Darwin providing direct and indirect jobs to many hundreds of people. You would have thought that this would be seen as something that's quite important, but there's been not a word, not a whimper, from the National Party about this very, very important regional development project which will support our target of zero emissions and do a great deal to demonstrate to the world how solar energy can be exported from Australia into our near neighbours. You don't have to be Einstein to work it out, but it seems you can't be in the National Party to do it. I don't know why that is, but you would have thought commonsense would prevail and they would see the merit in looking forward, not backwards, and understanding that we can have developments like this, which have a major advantage for the Northern Territory and, indeed, Australia—and, indeed, the world.

The project is expected to deliver a total carbon emissions abatement estimated at 8.6 million tonnes of CO2 per year. That's enormous. We should be celebrating. Instead of talking about old technologies, we should talking about new technologies. We should be parading our ability to get to the emissions target of zero emissions by 2050 and do something a lot better by 2030.