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

It is a great pleasure to be up here today to speak to such a fantastic bill—the Productivity Commission Amendment (Electricity Reporting) Bill 2023. Let me tell you: there is no greater truism than the one that says that what gets measured gets improved. I came from the private sector and worked in the finance field, and every good business out there—or any good business who wants to stay profitable—knows that you've got to do your month-end reporting every month. You have to track your costs. You have to track your revenue. You need to be able to measure your data to work out whether you're improving or going backwards.

That's exactly what this bill does. This is asking for centralised quarterly reporting of the cost of electricity, and that matters because, right now, electricity prices are going through the roof because of this insane renewable energy ideology being pushed by those on the other side, who are driving households into poverty. They are driving businesses into bankruptcy. They are sending jobs offshore. They are sending wealth offshore. It is an absolute disgrace.

It exposes the hypocrisy of the Albanese Labor government and of the Greens, who, for the last three years have been talking about greater accountability and greater transparency and yet intend to oppose this bill. What a disgrace. If they were really serious about the cost of living, they would support this bill so that we know exactly how much energy costs and what the break-up of those costs is. That includes not just the split between coal powered energy and renewable energy but also the amount of subsidies being put into the energy market.

We saw that yesterday with this ridiculous spending by the Queensland Labor government, where they're going to actually try and shut down Queensland coal-fired power stations, whilst at the same time raking in a huge surplus thanks to the foresight and vision of the great Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen, who built those coalmines 50 years ago. He got them built, built the railway lines, built the ports that created all the royalties, created all the freight revenue from the trains and all the demurrage charges from the ports.

All that money is going into Queensland, and yet for some reason we want to actually sell that beautiful black coal offshore and not use it here. Then they're going to turn around and rob Peter to pay Paul to offset the ridiculous energy costs spent as we import billions and billions of dollars of renewables from offshore. That money is going offshore on top of all the money that goes offshore because of these ridiculous carbon offsets. It is completely absurd that, when we have the lowest carbon footprint per capita in the world when you take in our natural carbon offsets, we pay other countries to offset their carbon emissions. Australia has a huge land mass. We have only 26 million people living here. We have got lots and lots of natural environment—our soil, our trees and our offshore waterways. We have phytoplankton—and I give a big shout-out to all the little phytoplankton out there sucking up the CO2; good stuff, guys! And yet we don't count it.

I come back to being accurate in measuring stuff because the reason why this bill is so important is that we do need to measure the horrendous costs of renewables. The crazy thing is that this is all based on the fallacy that somehow we can measure CO2. That was exposed in estimates, by none other than yours truly here, when the head of the CSIRO admitted that there are actually 40 different models to calculate net zero, to calculate carbon offsets. We've got to stop relying on models.

There's a difference between that side of the chamber and this side of the chamber. This side of the chamber believes in facts and real world data, whereas that side of the chamber wants to believe in fantasies and fairytales and to make up stories that are ultimately always disproved. We saw that happen in the last 12 months. I can well remember Senator Wong standing up here and going, 'Renewables are cheaper.' Guess what? They're not. If they were cheaper, the price of energy would be going down. But the price of energy isn't going down. It's going up. Everyone knows that, if you want to improve performance, you should start measuring this data.

Just last week we found out that the energy retailers are going to increase the cost of retail energy by 28 per cent. Can someone explain to me how that is going to help with the cost of living? I'm not hearing any interjections from the other side—of course not, because they have no answers. Yet right here in front of them is the answer that will at least start tracking the data and give us greater insight into how to bring the cost of energy down. Do the other side actually want to support it? No. They're the so-called party of greater accountability and greater transparency, and we've already seen that on display this week when people wanted to change. At first it was, 'There's no data and we know nothing about it,' but it turned out to be: 'No. Actually I was given information four days earlier.'

This is the thing. The lies from the other side about the cost of energy and how they're going to have transparency on national cabinet have been totally exposed. These people aren't interested in helping the people; they only want to control the people. That is what the Labor Party has become. Believe you me, the old Labor prime ministers will be rolling in their graves—the Labor prime ministers who came from blue-collar backgrounds, the toolies, the tradies and all of that. We know the Hawke-Keating government sold all that out and adopted a Marxist approach when they backed the Dawkins plan and backed the Button plan that basically destroyed manufacturing in this country and replaced it with academia running the world.

If this country wants to get back on its feet, it needs to get back on the tools. But we cannot get back on the tools in this country and rebuild manufacturing in this country if we don't have cheap and reliable energy. The sad thing is that we have the potential for cheap and reliable energy in this country. Just near my hometown we have 400 million tonnes of coal in the ground that is owned by the Queensland people. All it takes is the cost of production—the cost of digging it up, and it's only just below the surface, and taking it about two kilometres to the power station where you burn it and it's converted straight away into energy. It's not just Kogan Creek; it's Tarong Power Station. I can well remember in the early eighties when Tarong Power Station was opened that Queensland was excited. It delivered us the cheapest energy in the world.

Senator Scarr will well remember when I spoke in my first preselection speech at the exhibition showgrounds when I first moved to Brisbane from my hometown of Chinchilla in 1988. Brisbane was a big country town back then, and there was very little difference between those from the regions and the city folk because big-country-town Brisbane knew that it relied on the people in the regions to give the people in the big city their power and their jobs.

We should never forget that—that we are one country. The ideologues in the cities that want to impose poverty and austerity on the hardworking people of this country should be ashamed of themselves for wanting to import expensive energy from offshore in the form of solar panels that's going to destroy farmland, in the form of transmission lines that are going to wipe out large swathes of our beautiful environment, of our farmlands. For what? So they'll be sending power all around the country, when you can simply dig it up, put it straight into a power station, get it into the Southern Interconnector and there you go: one transmission line and it's done. But no, we're going to have this crazy grid-like structure where we're going to have transmission lines running across the country. We're going to have problems with synchronicity, keeping the electricity at a level amount of voltage—all of this stuff we're going to have.

And then of course we're going to have recycling. Yet again, this is another reason we need to measure the data. Another answer to a question in estimates, courtesy of Larry Marshall of the CSIRO, was that the cost of recycling batteries is three times more than the cost of producing them. How is that going to reduce costs? And let's not forget the crazy subsidies this government is giving to renewable energy: $224 million for 400 batteries that is basically going to power 100,000 homes. When I asked questions about this in estimates, the energy department didn't even know where these batteries were going to go. They originally thought these batteries were going to be off grid, and then they had to be corrected by my Senate colleague Senator Hughes, who effectively pointed out that, no, no, no, they're going in the inner city areas, these batteries that are already on grid. So why are we going to spend $224 million on batteries that at best might last for one to two hours and will effectively come out of the pocket of the taxpayer—another $224 million on that?

Then we've got the Clean Energy Finance Corporation. Can someone please tell me, if renewables are cheaper and so efficient, why they need to rely on government funding to be built? Why isn't the private sector, our wonderful banks—who are closing down branches in the regions so that they can reduce their carbon footprint; yet again it's the regions who have to pay the costs of this crazy ideology—funding renewables? I'll tell you why the banks won't fund renewables: because they won't make any money. And I will tell you another thing; I will tell you another thing. Why are they building these renewables? What's the cost to the environment going to be from the likes of Chalumbin Wind Farm, which is going up, being built, right next to World Heritage rainforest in North Queensland? That is going to be built on top of lakes—right next door to lakes—in the pathway of migratory birds and endangered species. How much koala habitat's going to be wiped out, how much glider habitat is going to be wiped out, before we realise that this crazy ideology is going to destroy not only the economy but also the environment? It's going to destroy the environment. And for what? Because of this imaginary ideology that there's a greenhouse up in the atmosphere, that there's a glass dome up here that attracts convection. It's completely absurd.

Yet here we are today trying to improve, trying to hold these people to account on the cost of energy. And what do they do? They're sitting there interjecting, still refusing to say that renewable energy makes money. Renewable energy makes money. Let's see it in these reports. But of course the Labor Party and the Greens won't do that, because they know their lies will be exposed. But let me tell you something: your lies have already been exposed. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese made a promise before the last election that he was going to reduce electricity prices by $275. That did not happen. Electricity prices have increased by about $700 already, and what are they going to do? They're going to rob Peter to pay Paul and give an energy rebate to some people. They're going to give an energy rebate to businesses, who now not only are going to have to pay higher electricity costs—and that is one of the biggest input costs of any serious goods and services producer—but also have to buy carbon offsets as well.

Are you people trying to build this country or destroy it? If I didn't know better, it would look to me like the Anthony Albanese Labor government is trying to destroy this country. They are trying to tear down everything our forefathers have built. It's not just in the energy sector; we know it's in the entire array of ideology, where everything is about guilt, shame and fear. These people do not want to build; they want to destroy. I say: shame on you. If you were serious about actually improving productivity in this country—and we hear it all the time: 'We've got to improve productivity; we've got to improve productivity'—you would start measuring input costs so that we could start to improve productivity and actually employ people in gainful employment, not employment where we sit around shuffling paper but employment where we're back on the tools, building things. You'd think the Labor Party, who, under the Button plan in 1985, destroyed manufacturing in this country and then introduced Marxism via their Dawkins plan in 1990, would want to do something about fixing up the mess that they made. But they don't. Well, I say: shame on you, Labor, and shame on you, the Greens. I commend this bill to the Senate—a brilliant bill that will lift productivity and hold the cost of electricity and renewables to account.