Michelle Ananda-Rajah (Higgins, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Australia going from a fossil fuel giant to the 'sun king' just came a step closer with the approval of the Sun Cable project by Tanya Plibersek. Sun Cable is an audacious project that will blanket 12,000 hectares of pastoral land in the Northern Territory with solar panels generating four gigawatts of continuous renewable energy which will be used for much-needed green industries in Darwin, with some shipped to Singapore via a 4,000-kilometre undersea cable. It will bring almost six times the energy of a 700-megawatt large nuclear reactor, and—here's the best part—with no overdraft from the Australian taxpayer and no iodine tablets for communities.

In a million years, this project would never have been signed off by the Liberals. Their brand of pessimistic politics is about division and doubling down on the past—on coal and gas, which is what they really crave while their uncosted, unviable and divisive nuclear reactors remain decades away in the never-never. Sun Cable is one of 55 renewable energy projects signed off on by this Albanese Labor government, enough to power seven million homes—that's New South Wales and Victoria and a bit more combined. Only renewables with storage, and a little bit of gas to fill in the gaps, can keep the lights on, lower our energy bills, bring an abundance of jobs for our kids—and there they are up there in the gallery—and get us to net zero.