Gerard Rennick (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Here are the facts. State governments run energy. It beggars belief that you could come into this chamber and try and blame the federal government for what is the responsibility of the state government. It's not rocket science. Read the Constitution. Let me tell you something. This is how it works. The swing state in energy, like it is with the economy, like it is with elections, is Queensland. Queensland has power capacity of 14 gigawatts, yet we use only 10 gigawatts. What that means is that the extra four gigawatts goes around the rest of the contrary.

On the cost, just last week a private industry decided that they're going to spend $350 million on creating a new solar wind farm in Queensland. That is a white elephant, because we don't need the energy. We've already got the energy. Any energy that's brought onto the system is going to have to go down to New South Wales or the south side, South Australia. The problem with that is that there's only a one-gigawatt transmission line. We already have four gigawatts of excess transmission, so why on earth would you go and build more renewable energy sources when there's no need for it? Why would you do that?

What makes this even worse is that the Queensland state Labor government think this is fantastic. They're trying to kill their own business. You see, Queenslanders know not to sell their power assets. They swear by their coal-powered power stations, as Labor found out, to their detriment, at the last federal election. Their own state government wants to destroy the power assets of the people of Queensland. The Queensland state Labor government is boasting about going to 50 per cent renewable energy. They want to destroy the very asset that belongs to the Queensland people. This $325 million investment is going to have to be absorbed through higher energy prices. It's not that hard to understand. We have an overinvestment in renewables—