Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

What a pleasure to follow Senator Hanson, who has made a sensible, rational contribution to this debate, like my colleague Senator Brockman earlier. It's pleasing to see some rationality and common sense coming into this whole debate.

The Turnbull government is focused on keeping the lights on and getting more affordable power to Australian households and businesses. Senator Hanson has just indicated how many people and businesses cannot afford to use electricity because of the cost of power, particularly in my home state of Queensland. Why? It is because the Queensland Labor government own the generators, and, for years, they've been gouging the price—adding to the price—to try and prop up their budget. 'Forget about the households or the small businesses. We need to try and balance our budget.' They've chased any other investment away from Queensland, so that's why power prices are so high in Queensland.

Our approach is driven by engineering and economics, not by ideology. It brings together the advice of the very best experts in the field, whereas from the Greens you get all the mantra, ideology and stuff they've read in left-wing papers around the world. It doesn't make any sense. They can never argue the case. They don't understand the issue. They just mouth the rhetoric and put that out as policy.

The Turnbull government has adopted the National Energy Guarantee, which is a practical, workable, pro-market policy to increase the affordability and reliability of our energy system whilst also meeting our international commitments. I have to remind everyone: Australia is one of the few countries—under Liberal governments, I might add—that has actually met its target from Kyoto and previous targets from Paris. We do that without subsidies. There are no subsidies, no taxes and no emissions trading schemes. The Turnbull government is focusing on this because the provision of affordable power is so important to every mum and dad and every household right throughout Australia, but more particularly so in my home state of Queensland.

You've heard the Greens in this debate and elsewhere talk about how these carbon emissions are destroying the world and destroying the Great Barrier Reef. I keep asking a question, and none of them will ever tell me the answer, because they can't. The question is: how come Australia's share of the world's emissions, 1.2 per cent—keep that figure in your mind—is going to change the whole climate of the world? In fact, when I questioned the Chief Scientist, Dr Finkel, about that and asked, 'If we stopped our emissions by 1.2 per cent, which is everything in Australia, what difference would that make to the changing climate of the world?' his answer was, 'Virtually none.'

Senator Williams has done some research into this with the help of the Parliamentary Library. He has shown me figures, and the Parliamentary Library has got them, where new power stations in China alone—