Susan McDonald (Queensland, National Party, Shadow Minister for Resources) Share this | Hansard source

It is fascinating to understand in greater detail each day the difference between those on this side and those on the other side and their understanding of what makes an economy work—what makes cost-of-living pressures work, what makes the cost of electricity work and what levers of government you can pull to make an economy successful. It doesn't matter how many times those opposite say words; it doesn't make them true. It just makes them tediously repetitive.

What I want to talk to you about, Mr Deputy President, is what it's really like to run a business and run a nation, and how proud I am of the legacy that we've left from the last nine years. We are one of only nine nations in the world to maintain a AAA credit rating following COVID, the greatest financial shock to the globe since the 1920s. I want to talk about how proud I am of the lowest unemployment rate in 50 years. That means people are at work in purposeful, meaningful work. That is incredibly important. We have left an economy that is ready to take advantage of the resources boom and the demand for Australia's agricultural industry. We are poised to take advantage of all of that, and we'll just have to see what Labor are going to do with the good fortune they have been left with.

The Treasurer has said that the point of his statement was to paint a picture of the economy. That is a gorgeous kind of description, but the economy is not an abstract painting. It requires a plan. It requires tough decisions in tough circumstances. What we are facing now, the tough circumstances of today, are higher costs of living faced by Australians. We know what that looks like. It looks like pain for small businesses, who are working 18 hours a day and struggling with not being able to find workers to help them to do the jobs which, in regional Australia, mean delivering the services that make everybody else's lives possible. It means families counting cents as they fill up the car, wondering whether, if they have to drive some distance to training, they can still have their children enrolled in sport. It looks like pain for Australians trying to build their first homes and students trying to create a better life for themselves. So the economy is not a mystery. The economy is made up of some very practical pieces. And I can tell you, Mr Deputy President, that the cost of power prices is one thing that today is crippling small businesses right across the country. I know from the days of running my business that there would not have been enough margin left to continue running it with the prices we have today. That is terrifying, because my business was providing food to families.

With regard to these power prices, we have to understand that the conversion to renewable energy takes time. It took a hundred years for oil to come in and take over from the horse, from horse power, and yet we want to change our economy within 15 years. Laugh if you will, Senator Hanson-Young, but it's not a laughing matter for those people who are going to pay the cost of transmission lines. Renewable energy projects that are being built in my part of the world are not being hooked up to the power lines, because they cannot take the intermittent voltage that is the result of renewables. In Queensland we don't even have reliable power now in renewable places, yet we're hooking up solar farms and wind farms that are just rusting away because nobody bothered to figure out whether or not the Queensland government would ever plug them in. That is why it is so important that we bring more gas supply to the market. We need to keep electricity reliable and dispatchable, an affirmed energy system, because it is not a laughing matter and it is not a fantasy. We cannot change our energy supply as fast as those opposite would like us to. I have no criticism of their aspirations, but we live in the real world where the absence of reliable transmission lines and firmed power means that we'll end up with no power at all. We'll end up without power to take ore out of the ground for the minerals that will reduce emissions.

Question agreed to.