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

It's great to speak this afternoon to this MPI. I have to say I agree with it. There is no doubt that the policies being adopted by the Labor government are harming Australians. It is pushing up their obsession with renewable energy. I use that word 'renewable' flippantly because this energy isn't renewable; it can't actually even be recycled, at least not for less than three times the cost of making it. That's a quote from the very mouth of the former head of the CSIRO. For some reason, the CSIRO doesn't want to include the cost of recycling renewables in their gen cost report, and that's something I'll touch on in a minute, but I really want to focus on the cost of living today.

Australians are struggling under the cost of living. As my colleague Senator Duniam pointed out, they're struggling under high interest rates brought about by Labor's mismanagement. Labor are also driving up the cost of energy, because renewables are very expensive. It's not just the point of delivery that matters; it's the cost of transmission, it's the cost of storage, it's the cost of security, the cost of frequency control—everything like that. All of that costs money. These are the hidden costs that aren't actually put into the energy budget models. It is misleading the Australian people and, unfortunately, it is hurting them in their hip pockets. If we want to solve this problem, we need to be very honest about the cost of renewable energy, because that is how it is harming the Australian people.

But it's not just the Australian people that are being harmed. I myself have been up to the proposed Chalumbin wind farm site. It's in the Great Barrier Reef basin. It beggars belief that farmers are required to prepare a basin management plan, at a great cost of up to $10,000, and they face $200,000 fines if some guy from the Department of Resources decides that they're not doing whatever they're doing properly. Hopefully, that is only ever going to be used in extreme cases where there is justification for it, but I fear that won't necessarily be the case. No, it's not just the economy that suffers as a result of this obsession with net zero; it's actually our environment itself.

We've got a lot of sites in Queensland. We've got the Chalumbin wind farm; we've got Eungella, upstream of the Pioneer river in Mackay, where the Queensland state government is proposing to take on an enormous pumped hydro project. This project is slated to provide five gigawatts of energy. You lose 20 per cent straight away when you do pumped hydro projects because you waste energy pushing it up the hill, so it's going to be at least six gigawatts of energy that have to be provided by wind farms.

On average, Queensland uses about nine gigawatts of energy a day, so we are talking about building enough windfarms to provide two-thirds of Queensland's energy in pristine native forest upstream of Mackay. That energy is then going to have to be transported a thousand kilometres south, back to Brisbane, if not further, so there will be further energy losses in the transmission lines as the energy is transported downstream. This is going to be very expensive. The Eungella region, upstream of Mackay, is also one of the world's more precious sites when it comes to platypus habitat. This is another example of how renewables, which are supposed to be saving the environment, are actually a threat to the environment and our biodiversity.

The Rewiring the Nation fund, which is going to fund this, is another Orwellian term. It's not rewiring Australia; it's adding more transmission lines, which are already there, in order to connect these isolated renewables projects to the grid. Thirty years ago we had about 30 power stations on the east coast of Australia; they provided all the grid's energy. They mightn't have been pretty; I'm not saying they were, but they were contained within a small footprint. These renewables projects are going to be spread across the environment and across the country, with another 10,000 kilometres of transmission lines. Enormous mines are going to have to be involved in getting the rare earth metals out of the ground. As I've said on numerous occasions, these so-called rare earths might be rare in the sense that the percentage of metal in their ore body is very small. It is going to be very damaging.