John Williams (NSW, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

Senator Xenophon, I will tell you what is hilarious: when I go back to South Australia and I see all of those wind towers over the hills at Jamestown. I have no problem with renewable energy, if it stands on its own two feet. But to think that three-megawatt per hour wind generators are subsidised to the tune of $700,000 a year each—that is for each one—so then they can sell electricity cheaper into the grid. And you wonder why Port Augusta goes broke. And you wonder why it is shut down. Then when the wind is not blowing, you wonder why you do not have electricity. I think the situation of these subsidies—these renewable energy certificates—to the wind towers is costing this country a fortune. As I said, in my life I have come from the little windmill on the farm to the batteries and to the generators. The situation we face now is that we have relied on cheap energy in this country to compete around the world. That is what we have relied on. Go to the abattoirs.

We have a business in Inverell—and I am very proud of it—called Boss Engineering. Seven years ago they kicked off. They employed seven people making wide air seeders for planting wheat, cereal, sorghum et cetera. They now employ just short of 100 people. When manufacturing is dying in Australia, Boss Engineering, making what I believe to be the best seed planter in the world, is growing week by week. But what is their energy cost going to be? What do we have more of per capita in this country than anyone else in the world? Energy: whether it be gas, whether it be coal or whether it be potential energy. I say that with total confidence.

Senator Duniam, hydro energy is a wonderful scheme while there is plenty of water in the dam, but it is not much good when the dam is empty, like the scare that hit Tasmania through that dry spell where they seriously looked at seeing their dams run dry—a very serious situation. Now we have adopted this whole policy of, 'Let's save the planet.' As Senator Macdonald has said in here 100 times, we produce 1.3 to 1.4 per cent of the world's CO2 emissions. Are we are going to change the planet? No, we are not. But what we are going to do, if we run out of energy and it gets more expensive, is simply put the cost up and transfer manufacturing overseas like we have already done so often during my lifetime. This is a serious situation, and I think it is very sad for a place like South Australia. I talked to my friend Michael Kelly at Jamestown. Michael lives with his wife, Mary-Ellen, there in Jamestown, where I grew up. His quarterly bill for just the two of them is around $800 a quarter. My quarterly bill at home on the farm—given that I have an underground bore that waters seven paddocks and an underground tank for the house with a pump that every litre that goes into the house is pumped through—