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

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answers given by the Minister for Finance (Senator Gallagher) to questions without notice asked by Senators Hume and Hughes today relating to wage growth and to energy policy.

This is an interesting situation we find ourselves in today, dealing with the cost of living and with real wages. It's interesting to note that at the end of the Howard government wages were increasing by 4.4 per cent a year and by the end of the Rudd-Gillard government they were down to 2.7 per cent a year. Arguably, the previous coalition government dropped a little bit, to 2.4 per cent, but it was nowhere near the same level of drop as what happened in the Rudd-Gillard era. I would like to note, however, that in the last nine years we have been wracked by a Senate that wouldn't pass bills and a bureaucracy that worked against us every time it got the chance, and of course we had to get through COVID, which was a very difficult time. And it didn't help when the RBA printed $300 billion and effectively fed that into the economy without any real investment in infrastructure.

It's interesting to note the difference between 2019, 2020 and 2009. When swine flu broke out in 2009, the coalition, the opposition of the day, didn't go and call for an immediate shutdown of the economy like Labor did when COVID broke out. That's really, really important, and, interestingly, it was well known that Nicola Roxon actually told the bureaucrats that we can't shut down, don't be silly. Yet we were forced to shut down and then the RBA went ahead—of course, it's an independent statutory authority, and for some reason people seem to think that we should outsource one of the most important economic levers to unelected officials—and printed $300 billion and thought they'd throw it out to the banks and then lower interest rates to 0.1 per cent. It's going to take a lot of winding back to deal with the inflation from those reckless actions that the RBA has undertaken, and unfortunately they've raised those interest rates. Good luck trying to raise real wages when you have inflation running at over six per cent under the Labor Party. It's not something I'd be getting too self-righteous about right here and right now.

The other thing we need to talk about is Labor's promise of reducing energy bills by $275. This is where the chickens have really come home to roost, because the woke brigade have been pursuing renewables at all costs, or what I like to call 'unreliables at all costs'—and it is at all costs, I might add—and billions and tens of billions of dollars have been sunk into the energy sector. And for what? What we've got is less reliability and higher power prices, and that's not surprising if you're going to go recklessly throwing science under the bus and engaging in junk science. It's junk science because, as everyone knows, heat's kinetic energy, the energy in motion, and the idea that it gets trapped is a complete oxymoron. If you step outside and look at a hot air balloon, when they turn up the gas, the hot air rises in outer space, negative 270 degrees. It’s called the entropy of a system always increases, the second law of thermodynamics. Anyone with a basic understanding of year 12 physics would know that. Anyway, I digress.

We need to go to why energy prices are increasing. It's very simple, because in the old days you had a coal fired power station—somewhere like Kogan Creek, which has 400 million tonnes of coal sitting underneath it or near to it—and you dig it up, put it into the coal fired power station and it goes straight through the transmission lines, including being interconnected to the southern states, and straight away it's in your houses or the factories where we desperately need cheap, reliable energy. But no, no, no, not with unreliables. With unreliables, what we've got to do is to wait for the sun to shine and the wind to blow, and we've got to get it to all these different stranded power stations around the country.

In order to join up these power stations, we've got to add transmission lines. The government opposite us want to spend $20 billion on building transmission lines to connect up all these new unreliable power stations, so that is a cost that isn't going to exist if you never relied on unreliables in the first place. But it doesn't stop right there, because then you have to build all these batteries to store the power for when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing. This stuff costs a lot of money. Lithium, for example, is a one per cent orebody. You have to mine 100 tonnes of ore to get one tonne of metal and then you're going to have to duck it through hundreds and thousands of litres of sulphuric acid. Heaven forbid if that ever leaches into the groundwater and gets out to our Great Barrier Reef. I know that the Greens are always talking about how they the Great Barrier Reef; well, I can tell you that that when we've got sulphuric acid going everywhere from the creation of these lithium batteries, we're going to have more problems there.

Then we have the whole problem of stability, so we have inertia control, and all those things are going to add to the costs. That's why power prices are going up, not to mention that there's a slight problem in Russia and Ukraine—I'll leave it to one side for the moment. But let me tell you this: Labor will never reduce power prices unless they back coal in this country. (Time expired.)