Jenny McAllister (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Climate Change and Energy) Share this | Hansard source

I thank senators for their contributions to what was a characteristically wide-ranging debate here in our chamber on the Offshore Electricity Infrastructure Legislation Amendment Bill 2022.

Sometimes discretion is the better part of valour, and I am always intrigued by decisions from opposition senators to come into this chamber and provide commentary about national energy policy. That's because the most significant characteristic of the last decade of Liberal government in coalition with their junior partners, the National Party, was an entirely chaotic approach to energy policy. Unhappily for Australians, we are reaping the benefits of that chaos. It is worth stepping through just a handful of their 22 policies—there are actually more policies than I would have time to go through. None of them landed, of course: not a single one of them landed.

Senators here who are honest with themselves will recall sitting on Senate committees when the energy industry, rather desperately, would come before senators in Senate committees and essentially say: 'For heaven's sake, could the government—could the Liberal-National government—please deliver a coherent, consistent and predictable energy policy so we can get on with energy decision-making?'