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

Not goldfish, Senator Scullion. They're going to burn coal. Are they going to burn the inferior poor quality coal from Indonesia and China—the brown coal—or the more efficient high-energy coal from Australia? If they burn Australian coal, there are going to be less CO2 emissions. That is a fact. But, of course, the Greens want to shut down every coalmine in Australia and see that no more coal is produced.

I wonder if the Greens ever drive a car. I'm sure some of them do. I wonder what the car is made of. Is it made of leaves and bark from trees or is it made of steel? I bet you it's made of steel. How do we get steel? From iron ore. Processed with what? Coal—coking coal. We use high-quality coal to produce our steel. It's all right to have coal to produce everything the Greens want—perhaps their timber furniture, their timber floorboards, their steel-framed house or whatever they live in—but it's not all right for anyone else. This whole political line they run is just a farce. Steelmaking relies on coal. It's just a fact that the use of coal is going to increase as time goes on.

The International Energy Agency, the IEA, has declared that coal has made a comeback in the latest World Energy Outlook update. The World Energy Outlook 2018 shows continued strong growth in Asia and demand for coal through to 2040. You protest here about coal-fired generation. Why don't you go to China or Asia or India and protest there? You'd probably get short shrift if you did; that's probably why you don't go over there. The big emitters are producing and building new coal-fired generation plants, while we shut them down in Australia and then complain that our electricity prices are so high. Under the IEA's new policy scenario, which includes countries' nationally determined contributions under the Paris Agreement, the WEO estimates that growth in demand for coal in the Asia-Pacific will increase by 492 million tonnes of coal equivalent by 2040. The Asia-Pacific region is going to burn an extra 492 million tonnes of coal a year, but we just shut our coal-fired generation plants. There are 22 here producing reliable energy, and we're going to change the planet? No, we're not. We go through the cost and we run the risk of shifting businesses overseas and shutting them down here, like the cement industry.

I remember the carbon tax days of the Labor government—the tax we were promised would never happen under a Gillard led government, but of course it did happen with the big push of the former member for New England, Tony Windsor. We produced 10 million tonnes of cement in Australia, and 0.8 of a tonne of CO2 for each tonne of cement. So 10 million tonnes of cement makes eight million tonnes of CO2. We were going to shut the industry down and go to China, where they produce one billion tonnes of cement a year. When they produce one tonne of cement, they produce 1.1 tonnes of CO2. So if we shut down our 10 million tonnes of cement, which produced eight million tonnes of CO2, and shifted to China, if we buy 10 million tonnes off them, they produce 11 million tonnes of CO2—three million tonnes extra for cement.

This is the crazy way that people think. We in Australia put our costs up, shut our mines down, put people on the dole, drive around in cars made of tree leaves and bark and don't have any steel through the process of coal contributing to that. Be realistic. Shut industries down and move them overseas, and those same industries that do the same job overseas will actually produce more CO2 on the planet. We don't have a tent over Australia. As Dr Finkel told Senator Macdonald at Senate estimates, we can cut all of our emissions in Australia, and the change to the world would be virtually nothing.

This is a political game being played. Be realistic. No matter what we do in this country, we cannot change the planet with CO2. But we can look after our environment. We can look after our rivers and water systems. We can look after our farmland and the topsoil that's got to grow the food for thousands of years to come. We can actually put carbon dioxide into the soil, build the carbon levels, make the soil better and have a positive effect on our environment. This whole emissions trading scheme, this carbon tax and all these costs we're running now will achieve absolutely nothing.