Malcolm Roberts (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Hansard source

As a servant to the many different people who make up our one Queensland community, I speak to the Productivity Commission Amendment (Electricity Reporting) Bill 2023. Anthony Albanese, when opposition leader, promised to save households $275 a year on their electricity bills. That was a lie, as the now Prime Minister now shows in changing his promise from an actual saving to simply reducing the rate of increase by $275—very subtle. It means he doesn't give a damn about people paying extra prices. Of course, there is no talk of this saving because electricity bills are out of control anyway.

People can't afford to turn on the heater, and the information the Senate needs to review the government's performance is literally all over the place, scattered to the wind. The Australian Energy Market Operator, AEMO—another alphabet soup—maintains an online dashboard with retail pricing in there somewhere, although not in an easily understandable summary form—so, for many people, it's not useful. The Australian Energy Market Commission, AEMC, maintain their residential electricity price trends—again, not in summary form. The Australian Energy Regulator maintains some data called Energy Made Easy—really? Private companies like Canstar put out data. It is all different, scattered.

This tells us two things. Firstly, we have way too many government agencies, each a product of a market failure that was fixed by adding—wait for it—another agency. The government agencies were causing the problems, and the solution, according to the government, was another agency. That in turn caused another market failure which was fixed with another agency, then another agency. You see what I'm saying. Who funds at all? We, the taxpayers, fund it all.

What's the effect of all this bureaucracy and poor decisions on our electricity prices? When electricity generation used reliable base load coal, we only needed a fraction of this bureaucracy because coal was responsive to demand peaks and troughs. It was cheap, affordable, reliable, secure, synchronous and stable. And it was environmentally responsible, and it still remains environmentally responsible. Now, thanks to the Liberal-Nationals and the Labor-Greens, we have the miracle of renewable power, and we have all these alphabet agencies working away making electricity so dear that nobody can afford it. It is a complete failure of governance for the last three decades—actually, since 1996, with the Howard-Anderson Liberal-National government.

Secondly, the data is all over the place. Assembling an accurate picture of how much more everyday Australians have to pay for their electricity bills requires a data gathering exercise of a type the Australian Bureau of Statistics would probably need 18 months to complete. This is not a flaw in the system; it's a design feature, as I'll explain with another example on cost in a minute. The more agencies, the more fractured the data and the less chance the Senate—the Senate is the house of review—or the people will be able to work out just how bad things are, and things are very, very bad. Constituents are sending my staff their electricity bills and quotes, phoning my office in tears.

We're seeing 30 and 40 per cent increases in electricity bills. That's horrific, but it's even worse when you consider the trebling of electricity prices in the last two or three decades. It's 30 and 40 per cent on top of a huge bill that's been inflated in the last two or three decades. So where's that $275 saving the Prime Minister used in a cynical vote-buying exercise? It's a lie. It's nowhere. The Prime Minister and his carpetbagger mates in the disposable energy market conned the Australia public.

Disposables—I call solar panels and wind turbines disposables, because these monstrous things only last 12 years at most. Then they have to be disposed of and replaced, with no recycling because recycling solar panels and wind turbines requires too much energy—it's not cost effective, it's not energy effective. Not one element of the electricity generation needed to meet the United Nations 2050 net zero target, which the Liberal-National government signed us up for and the Labor Greens pushed, and not one panel that the politicians volunteered us for is installed in Australia right now in 2023. What do I mean by that? Not one panel that we will need in 2050 is installed now. Every solar panel and wind turbine in place now will be replaced four times—four times!—in the lead-up to 2050. Every last solar panel and every last wind turbine we have now installed will be ripped out and sent off to the tip before 2050, all of it to be replaced four times.

You think power prices are a scandal now? They are. Yet this nightmare is only getting started. Most people would think one solution would be encouraging gas stoves and discouraging electric cars. That would take pressure off electricity generation. The disposable ideologues on both sides of this chamber are doing the complete opposite. They're banning gas stoves and encouraging electric cars, which need more electricity. It will increase electricity demand and further increase prices. It will actually increase gas usage, because, right now, you can turn on a switch at your home and get abundant gas. Without a gas stove, you'll have to rely upon a gas-fired power station to send electricity to your home with transmission losses along the way. So there'll be more gas used to generate the same amount of energy that you could generate right now in a gas stove.

The average Australian street of 20 homes can only afford to have three homes with electric cars before the draw on the power heats up the power lines and causes a blackout. It's almost as if the inhuman Greens, teals and Chris Bowen's energy vandals want things to be miserable for everyday Australians. That's what they're doing—they're destroying lifestyles and livelihoods for Australians.

The reason behind this energy vandalism is simply power. I don't mean the type we used to be able to afford—electric power. I mean political power and control over people's lives through the restriction and control of electricity. The idea behind removing coal power from the grid is that it creates an artificial scarcity that these electricity vandals can use to bring in controls on everyday Australians' power usage. Control is the objective.

Smart metres are already being introduced. They'll be set to allow each household a limited amount of power and will switch off when the limit is reached. Control. They will control when we use our electricity, how we use it and what we use it for. Only the wealthiest Australians who can afford to pay for their energy will have air-conditioners. Everyday Australians will not.

We know this from the Prime Minister's housing bill, which will build a few thousand new homes at a cost per unit that is so low there can't possibly be room for air-conditioning. We know that the sustainable housing guidelines the Greens tried very hard to make mandatory on this housing bill only allow for homes to be built with ceiling fans, not air-conditioners. No wonder Bob Brown was run out of town in Clermont, in central Queensland, when he brought his climate and energy rationing alarmism to rural Queensland. Try not having air-conditioning in Queensland's rural bush.

Senator Duniam's bill will help the debate. This bill will give the public, the media and the politicians the data we need to prove that climate crazies and their energy vandalism are making life miserable for everyday Australians for no damn reason other than control of people—for no environmental benefit. Indeed, it will damage the environment catastrophically, as people desperate for warmth will return to wood fires, as they have been in Victoria. One Nation will support this bill because One Nation likes and spreads truth, because One Nation likes to empower people, because One Nation likes to free people to make informed choices, which they can't do at the moment.

I want to talk about a few other points. The primacy of energy: energy multiplies itself right throughout the whole of our economy. Everything depends upon electricity. It is a primary aspect of our society, modern society. The evils and anomalies of solar and wind are becoming apparent. I was at the property rights of Australia conference in Gympie last Friday. The anger amongst farmers and townspeople in rural Queensland is palpable. The people are coming for you, Greens, Labor, and also the wet Liberals and Nationals, with pitchforks. They want to know what the effect is on prices. It's a very harsh awakening, now, for people in the bush, because they're waking to the realities of solar and wind—paving huge acreages with glass panels, destroying rainforests for wind turbines and blighting the visual pollution on the landscape.

Alan Moran, the noted economist, prepared an independent study for me entitled The Hidden Cost of Climate Policies and Renewablesbasically, the hidden cost of climate policies and solar and wind. He refers to solar and wind as 'parasitic malinvestments'. He's an independent researcher and independent economist with an international reputation and is highly respected. He compiled the cost data from many state and federal government departments from government data and budgets and reports. It cannot sensibly be refuted. It's very three years old, but the figures are shocking because they haven't been updated. So imagine the figures now. Let's go through some of those figures. His executive summary says:

Australia's excessively high electricity prices are undermining our economic resilience and competitiveness and cutting our standards of living. Since 2002 Australian governments, in a misguided quest to reduce carbon dioxide, have introduced climate policies at the expense of cheap coal and gas power. Our electricity prices, once the lowest in the world, have become one of the most expensive.

That seriously affects our security, seriously affects our competitiveness. He goes on:

Australians will be shocked to know the true financial burden of these policies on households and industry. These hidden costs drive up all costs of living, including electricity, food, water and transport.

In summary, in 2019, he said solar and wind and climate policies cost households at least $13 billion annually, or around $1,300 per household. That is on top of the electricity bill. That's an additional cost beyond the increases in electricity costs. It goes across the economy for $19 billion. That was four years ago. Solar and wind and climate policies account for 39 per cent of household electricity bills, not the 6½ per cent that the then Liberal and National government was typically quoting. It causes a net loss of jobs in the economy; with every so-called solar and wind subsidised job created, 2.2 jobs are lost. There are market distortions involved in destroying the coal sector that are subsidising solar and wind. These market distortions increase the wholesale prices of electricity to $92.50 per megawatt hour, up from $45.40 per megawatt hour. It more than doubled because of the policies of the Liberal-National government and the Labor-Greens government.

These are Moran's words: 'Investment in supposedly Green energy is a malinvestment'—a parasitic malinvestment that destroys the host, the Australian economy. The parasites are destroying the host. He goes on:

It defies all sense that Australia's average price per kwh for electricity is three times that of India and China when they are using our coal. All Australians have a right to benefit from our rich natural resources and governments have an obligation to foster high growth environments for Australian industry, and support high standards of living for all of us. The parasitic and hapless renewables industry will provide neither.

The parasitic and hapless solar and wind industry will provide neither high standards of living nor support for industry.

What's the effect on prices of all these policies? It's catastrophic. We've gone from having the cheapest electricity in the world to having the most expensive, and yet we are the world's biggest exporters of energy—absolutely bloody ridiculous.