Simon Birmingham (SA, Liberal Party, Minister for Education and Training) Share this | Hansard source

How sad and cynical of Senator Hanson-Young! How sad and cynical that she sees no benefit in the types of nation-building infrastructure projects the Turnbull government is thinking about. How sad and cynical that she does not recognise that, by actually investing in projects like the Snowy Hydro project, by investing in projects like the Cultana pumped hydro project in western South Australia—that these types of projects can make what is currently a broken model in relation to our energy market work better for us in the future; and that the Greens, who have championed wind power and have championed renewable energy over many, many years in this place now will not come to recognise that you actually need these types of investments that the Turnbull government is talking about and trying to pursue and get implemented to actually make your wind energy work—because we need these types of investments to stabilise the system, to stabilise the energy grid, to ensure that, actually, when the wind is not blowing, you still have power going through the system. Senator Hanson-Young, I would have thought that you, as a South Australian Senator—like me—would come to appreciate and recognise that over the course of the last six months in particular, it has become quite clear that there are fundamental problems in our electricity market. And we have put on the table solutions to those problems—solutions that are not what Jay Weatherill is proposing in spending more than half a billion dollars of new taxpayers' money building a new gas-fired power plant to replace the one that is mothballed or to replace the coal-fired plants he has closed down, but are actual solutions that will ensure that we make the current circumstance work better in terms of the energy that is going into the grid right now, make it more sustainable, and put those mechanisms in place that will smooth out the energy market whilst—and I would have thought, Senator, you would be welcoming this fact—they might also make renewable energy projects work better in the future than they currently are at present.