Ron Boswell (Queensland, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you for your protection, Madam Temporary Chairman. You might think: ‘Renewable energy: what a wonderful thing. Look at all those windmills out there pumping out electricity’—when the wind happens to blow. But, in real terms, these people are losing money because you designed a scheme—a much simpler scheme than the ETS—and it has been a dud. Those are people that have actually taken you at your word. I will tell you this, Senator Wong. When the sugar industry came to me and said, ‘We want to get into this renewable energy,’ I said: ‘Don’t touch it with a 40-foot barge pole. Walk away from it. You’re going to get caught.’ They said, ‘No, Senator Boswell, you promised us. We have invested money on the promise of the Liberals, Nationals, Greens and Labor.’ I said: ‘All right. My word’s my word. I’ll vote for the thing.’ And what happened? I was perfectly right. It has been a huge dud that is going to send some of these people into huge debt.

That is what you get when you take on board Senator Milne’s schemes. They are not practical. You can generate electricity with a squirrel running around in a cage, but it is not going to be terribly practical or give out a lot of power. Senator Milne seems to think: ‘We’ll up this a bit. We’ll go for a gross feed-in tariff.’ That means everyone who puts any power into the grid gets paid for it. You might think, ‘Wonderful, that’ll produce more renewable energy’—except that some poor small business people down there with half-a-dozen fridges or a couple of welders are paying the $50 or $20 rent, or whatever the rent is. It is subsidised. So no-one is winning out of this. Let us be practical on this.

This is probably the difference between this side of parliament and the Greens: the Greens are wonderful dreamers. They dream up all these wonderful things that are going to save the world. They do not worry about whether anyone else is going to be involved in it; it does not really matter to them. They want a target. The Greens never chase a majority vote. They are very happy with a 10 per cent vote. They say, ‘Drop the 90 per cent of the people, do not be practical, just go and get the zealots, the extreme greens, and we will get the five or six seats in the Senate, the conservation groups will hand out how to vote cards, we will get the preferences and we will control the Labor Party.’ A very simple equation! You would think that Senator Cameron would be in there backing the 1,200 people who are going to lose their jobs. Look at Yabulu today—