Joanne Ryan (Lalor, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question as to the Prime Minister. Why, Prime Minister, is the government focused on renewables with firming capacity for future energy needs? What alternatives to the government's plans have been proposed?

Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the Chief Government Whip for her question. Indeed, the government is very focused on the fact that renewables are the cheapest form of new energy and that firming capacity through gas or the use of batteries will be important in driving that home. But we have had some alternatives floated, and the Leader of the Opposition's media team were around the gallery yesterday saying they were going to make a decision last night and were going to announce their nuclear policy. Today he went to the party room and said, 'Well, there were a few details that were outstanding—just four: safety, disposal, cost and location.'

So apart from safety, apart from the disposal, apart from the cost, and apart from where they're going to go, it's all sorted out for those opposite: 'Good news, team, good news.' Other than that, everything is ready to go, ready to rip. You just need to buy the land, pour the slab, build the walls and put the roof on, then we have a new house. Unbelievable!

In fact, nuclear power is a lot like the Liberal Party: no help to anyone today, completely wrong for Australia's future, and notorious for waste that takes forever to clean up. But we've been cleaning up their waste. This farce shouldn't come as a surprise. This is the mob who thought the NBN should be built not with fibre but with copper wire. This is the mob that were promising commuter car parks where there were no train stations. It's amazing they are so opposed to turbines when you consider how much wind they generate, over and over again. The climate is changing but they never will. They had 22 policies on energy in opposition. Now they have come up with a 23rd, but they can't land it. They couldn't land it in government, and they couldn't land it in opposition.

The truth is that during their decade in office, 24 of the country's coal fired power stations announced they would close. Eight of them actually closed on their watch, in spite of the fact they had a prime minister who would come in here with a lump of coal saying that it was all okay, they didn't need to act. The truth is that they left the mess. They left a mess when it came to the need to have a proper energy policy. We've got one. We look forward to them announcing their policy when they sort out those four little issues.