Doug Cameron (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

We have just heard Senator Madigan's 'stop the planet; I want to get off'' bill. That is what this is. We have around the world wind power being installed at an unheard-of level. I used to work at Liddell Power Station, which is a 2,000-megawatt coal fired power station and one of the biggest in Australia. To try to get some understanding of what is happening with wind power: in 2012 alone there is around the world 238 gigawatts of wind power installed. That is about 119 Liddell Power Stations—a huge investment in wind power all around the world. If you look at the International Energy Agency website and you go to what is targeted for wind power around the world, you see that it is targeted to pick up 12 per cent of energy needs by 2050. That requires 47 gigawatts of installation of wind power every year for the next 40 years. It is $81 billion a year in investment.

Senator Madigan said that this was a billion-dollar industry. Senator Madigan, it is not a billion-dollar industry; it is a trillion-dollar industry. The industry will have to invest $3.2 trillion through to 2050 to meet that 12 per cent with wind energy. Senator Madigan throws these words around—'The wind energy industry can do whatever it likes' and 'The system allows it to do whatever it likes'—but I did not see Senator Madigan sleeping through any of the evidence, so he has obviously ignored much of it. He obviously has not read the evidence from the Queensland conservative government, who say that they have stringent regulation in place, that they do not want an industry to operate without any regulation and that the regulations that are in place with the state governments around this country are amongst the most stringent regulations anywhere in the world.

I have a little bit of an issue with Senator Madigan's approach on this. I would like to remind the Senate why we need renewable energy. The climate science is in, Senator Madigan. You cannot continue to believe that the climate science is not there and that this is some kind of conspiracy by the wind power industry or some group of bankers in Zurich or somewhere. This is a real problem. It is a problem the world is struggling to deal with, and wind energy is one of the key components to try to deal with the issue of global warming and climate change. I know many senators in this place are sceptics, deniers, conspiracy theorists or just political opportunists on this.