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

I thank the Senate for agreeing to debate this important issue. Few things exercise the minds of Australians more than when they receive these little envelopes in the post claiming they are electricity bills. It fills hearts with dread. It puts fear into everyone who struggles with their household budget. The reason for this fear can be laid fully and squarely at the feet of government—both stripes of government, the blue team and the red team, because for the last 10 years they have been tinkering with the electricity market. They have been corrupting the electricity market, in the sense they have sought to make it uneconomic and somehow subsidise it into existence. In doing so, they have squandered and destroyed the competitive advantage that Australia previously had—that is, an abundance of fossil fuels and an abundance of cheap electricity—and now we have amongst the most unreliable and most expensive electricity in the Western world, and it is getting worse.

This has all been done under the guise of climate change. Any thinking person knows that nothing Australia does to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, even if you believe that they are pollutants, is going to change the climate one jot or one tittle. Yet tens of billions of dollars have been thrown into wind power and solar subsidies to somehow change the climate.

In the latest incarnation of it we had the national emissions guarantee, which, of course, was abandoned when Labor's greatest Prime Minister, known as Mr Turnbull, was deposed from office. Twice he lost his leadership of the Liberal Party, twice on the basis of trying to implement an emissions trading scheme which was against Australia's economic interest. It has no benefit or relevance to the environmental circumstances in which Australia finds itself and yet it was going to damage even further every aspect of Australia's way of life and the affordability for Australian families and for industry to get ahead and create prosperity for our country. Nothing is more important to the Australian people than having reliable and cheap power, because that is what is going to propel economic growth in this country. It is what is going to allow Australians to heat their homes in winter, cool their homes in summer, keep the lights on, enjoy the benefits that an electronic age has today and also provide them with the jobs and the quality and the standard of living that they deserve.

It is time for governments of whatever persuasion to act in the interests of Australian citizens, not in the self-indulgent interests of the United Nations. Just today I read about the Paris climate accord. For those who are ever suspicious about its real motivation, it is about who administers a $100 billion fund to support a bunch of two-bit, often corrupt countries that are seeking to extract cash out of Western democracies under the guise of being disadvantaged because of climate change. It is nonsense. It is errant nonsense. We know that the Pacific islands are not sinking and yet they continue to demand money from Western nations. What's even more galling is the coup leader from Fiji was, until a couple of weeks ago, president of this auspicious body designed to extract $100 billion from Western nations. It's little wonder Russia's not participating. It's little wonder America has walked away from it. It's little wonder China and India aren't being held to account for their emissions. It's because they all know this is a giant con.

It is time for the Australian government, whether it is a coalition government or whether—God forbid—it becomes a Labor government after the next election, to start acting in our national interest. That means getting out of the electricity market, getting out of subsidising the uneconomic and the unaffordable and providing some market certainty and operational security for those countries that want to invest in electricity infrastructure but not subsidise them. If you want to help the electricity market, commit to investing or putting the $450 million the government spends every single year towards new generation— (Time expired)