Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

The Prime Minister's capitulation to the coal industry will be an unmitigated disaster for my state of Tasmania. This, on the face of it, takes the axe to the renewable energy target, which means that a number of new renewable projects that are in the pipeline in Tasmania will now have a business case that will be compromised or at least not as promising as it would otherwise have been. It means that Hydro Tasmania, the Tasmanian government owned electricity generation business, will lose a flow of renewable energy certificate revenue from 2030, and ultimately this will mean less renewable energy in Tasmania, fewer opportunities for Tasmanians, fewer jobs in Tasmania and less capacity for Tasmania to play a significant role in displacing coal-fired power from the national grid.

So it's an unmitigated disaster for Tasmania. It's an unmitigated disaster for the renewable energy sector in this country. And that sound we can hear—there it goes!—is the corks popping in the boardrooms of coal companies in this country.