Cory Bernardi (SA, Australian Conservatives) Share this | Hansard source

This is an important motion because in around a month's time the South Australian people will face an election critical to the future and good fortunes of my state. This is effectively the last opportunity we will have in this place to bell the cat about some of the issues that are confronting South Australia and to examine some of the solutions, or non-solutions, that haven't been put forward by some of the major parties. And it's significant because what happens in South Australia will affect the rest of the Commonwealth. It's no secret that there are many people who complain about the additional GST that South Australia receives above what it generates for itself. After 17 March the question is going to be that the government in South Australia is either going to lift its game and grow the national pie or continue to keep begging from the Commonwealth as it seeks to grow the size of government. This is the essence of what we face.

In South Australia industry is in decline and confidence is in decline, and it manifestly resolves around the approach of government. The Weatherill government, which has been a Labor government for 16 years, is as much an indictment on the Liberal opposition as on their own ideological bent. I say that because for 16 years they have got away virtually unchallenged in the parliamentary term. They've rarely been confronted about the most significant issues that our state has had to deal with.

When it comes to elections, the Liberals have done reasonably well. They've had the popular vote on more than a couple of occasions, but they haven't got it in the right spot. Their weakness has allowed the Weatherill government to pursue an agenda which has done an enormous disservice. Firstly, we have a massive focus of employment within the public service, which is unsustainable. There are a legacy of elections where they say they're going to make sure that 5,000 additional front-line public service places are implemented, and over the course of the next two or three years there are tens of thousands of jobs that are created there. You may say that is good, but they're back-office services, they're designed to entrench government as the centre of the economy and they're not delivering prosperity or reasonable outcomes to the people of South Australia.

Nowhere is this more glaring than in the idea of electricity generation. I've been very critical of this for a very, very long time in this place. I do not buy the subsidies for green power, wind power and solar power; I do not accept this is in our long-term interest. The ideological obsession of those on the other side of the chamber—and too many on this side, I might add—against coal, against gas and against fossil fuels has perhaps produced the Petri dish which is called the South Australian electricity industry. It's no secret that we have the most unreliable and unaffordable electricity in the Western world—or almost. It's because the Labor government has been pursuing a 50 per cent Renewable Energy Target, which I regret the Liberal Party signed up to as well as the Xenophon party. The result is we've got a lot of unedifying windmills, we have a lot of solar panels and we don't have any electricity to drive the things that create jobs and generate wealth.

What's the answer to the blackouts and the unreliability according to the Weatherill government? It's to get Tesla's PT Barnum, the equivalent of the monorail salesman from The Simpsons, Mr Elon Musk, to come out to Australia to spend $100 million on a battery that will power the state for about four minutes should it be required. In the meantime, in order to justify and pretend that there is not a problem, they're burning tens of millions of litres of diesel fuel and funding running diesel generators to keep the electricity on during the day. It is an appalling indictment; it is a sleight of hand.

The Labor Party have been able to get away with it because of the weakness of the opposition. Mr Marshall may be a well-meaning man, but he was hugging windmills when he should have been blowing them up. He was helping to blow up the coal-fired power station, when he should have been saying, 'No, let's retain it.' The man has had to be dragged kicking and screaming to every party position that he has actually had, and I can only reflect on the malaise that is infecting South Australia when I quote someone from the opposition benches. They said, 'We might not be any better than the other mob, but we sure won't be any worse.' What a terrible choice, and little wonder that former Senator Xenophon is capturing this market and never being held to account. This is the travesty: Senator Xenophon and his party are taking on the mantra up here of just throwing billions of dollars of borrowed money at issues, but not fixing them—all care and no responsibility.

This is not what South Australia can afford. We need a principled approach to making South Australia the most competitive it can be, and you do that by cutting taxes. You do that by providing the unique competitive advantage that Australia has hitherto had: the cheapest and most reliable electricity program anywhere in the world. That is what will sustain manufacturing. That is what will attract industry. It will retain people in our state: if there are jobs for them and if the utilities are affordable. The quality of life in South Australia, outside of not having a job or the price of electricity, is amazing. We have an abundance of resources. We have huge potential. We just need governments to get out of the way and actually unleash it. You don't get out of the way by foisting new taxes on individuals and making the cost of living unaffordable for them.

We have to do this. We have to fix states like South Australia in order to fix the Commonwealth, quite frankly. There is no way we can say we're going to reapportion some GST to the Western Australians without there being the consequential damage to another state. And who's going to put their hand up for that? No-one. We have to grow the pie, which means we have to make sure that every state can stand on its own and do it's very, very best. In order to do that, we can't dictate from here. We shouldn't centralise power here. We've got to make sure that we have governments in respective states that are going to deliver the services they want, without mortgaging the future of our children. We need governments that are going to produce the outcomes that are going to entice, attract or retain our young people. That is the great lament for so many people of my age in South Australia: we see our teenagers grow into adults and we watch them go away to university, and we wonder, 'Are they still going to be here in three, four or five years time?'

I reflect that, back in the nineties, we lost a generation of young workers in South Australia because of the malpractice and the malfeasance of the then state Labor government. It was terrible. It virtually bankrupted the state. We weren't alone in that, but we never managed to redress it because there was a lack of conviction from the government that ultimately replaced them. They were consumed by internal turmoil and factional warfare, which they're still paying the price for.

I come back to this: we cannot afford for my state, the state of South Australia—a very important state that is now the heart of defence manufacturing and that has enormous export potential in the grains, seafood, aquaculture and wine industries—to go backwards. That means we have to confront some of the issues that we're dealing with. I have enormous respect for my colleague Senator Ruston, who I'm sure is going to get up and talk about the potential of so much in South Australia and how it has been hamstrung. But there are very few in government who are without sin in this place. We need courage. It is going to take enormous courage to confront the necessary issues in South Australia. We're going to have to start to examine a nuclear fuel cycle in South Australia. We're going to have to recognise that we have 25 per cent of the world's uranium resources, and we're not allowed to use it. We have coal. We have gas. We have potential. We have a wonderful quality of life. We just need a government that is going to embrace it, get behind it, and back it to the hilt.