Scott Ryan (Victoria, Liberal Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Education and Training) Share this | Hansard source

If brown coal is taken away from Victorians, their power prices will dramatically spike. There is no resource in Victoria that can supply baseload power at that price nor can we import the power that we need to keep Victoria going. To say that solar panels on roofs and windmills on our landscape can power the entire state of Victoria is profoundly and utterly misleading. But the Greens do this in order to try and drive their vote higher in the inner northern suburbs of Melbourne, between the CBD and the lycra belt. These facts need to be known because the policies of the Greens hidden behind a veil of alleged respectability pose a real threat to most Victorians.

Over the last few months, we have seen the largest ever decrease in power prices in the records of the ABS in this country, because the carbon tax, which the Greens say was too small, was removed. Because brown coal has higher emissions than black coal, that had a greater impact in Victoria—just as the carbon tax had a greater risk for Victoria—because it is more emissions intensive. But, also, the war of the Greens on trying to prevent the expansion of the use of natural gas goes against their stated objective, because the single-greatest decrease in the emissions intensity over the last decade has been in the American economy due to the dramatic expansion of the use of natural gas.

Victoria potentially has very rich natural gasfields, yet because their favoured suppliers, donors and campaign workers all think we can run round with solar panels on our bike helmets, the Greens refuse to consider the expansion of responsible fossil fuels. There is no alternative to the use of fossil fuels to provide the majority of power not only in Australia but around the world. The facts about increasing access to energy and making energy cheaper in the developing world are all about expanding the use, responsibly, of fossil fuels, and that will not change with the current technology mix. This motion should be treated with the contempt that the empty slogans and the hypocritical statements of the Greens constantly illustrate to this chamber.