Matthew Canavan (Queensland, Liberal National Party) Share this | Hansard source

First of all, I want to congratulate Senator Babet for bringing this excellent motion forward. Secondly, I will raise something that none of my esteemed colleagues on the other side have spoken about today, and that's people's power bills. People are really struggling out there at the moment. They're struggling to pay their mortgages and for petrol, and they're struggling every quarter when a new power bill turns up, almost invariably higher than the power bill they received the quarter before. The No. 1 thing Australian people want us to focus on is supporting things that can bring down living costs, including power prices, for them. There is no doubt in my mind that building new always-on baseload power stations is the key way to bring power prices down. We've already tried a failed approach. What we've been doing is not working, clearly, and no one on the other side has suggested anything different from what we are currently doing. What we have been doing in the past 15 years is massively increasing our production of renewable energy—it has gone from five per cent of our electricity production to more than 25 per cent—nearly 30 per cent. It has more than quintupled. We have more than quintupled the amount of renewable energy we have produced in this nation, and over that time power prices have more than doubled for Australian families. No matter how many times you say as a mantra that renewable energy is the cheapest form of power, you cannot deny the raw basic facts that the more we seem to install of this cheapest form of power, the higher our power prices go. Why is that? It's because renewable energy is on only every now and again. It's not on all the time, and in the times it is not on, you have to have very expensive backup, whether it is gas or restricting power output at factories. All these ridiculous things—when the sun's not shining, when the wind's not blowing—are costing us a fortune.

We should listen to other countries that have made these mistakes and learn from their examples. As Senator Cadell said, the International Energy Agency has clearly spoken on this. They've looked at different technologies from all over the world, and said in a report only a couple of years ago that 'electricity from the long-term operation of nuclear power plants constitutes the least cost option for low-carbon generation'. Anyone who is against nuclear power in this country is for higher power bills for the Australian people. Those are basic facts. Anyone who wants to come in and say the CSIRO found something different—no, they don't. The CSIRO doesn't actually look at existing nuclear technologies. Have a look at the so-called GenCost report: there is not a single bit of analysis of the cost of existing nuclear technologies. They look only at these small modular technologies in 2030. They make estimates. They're all predictions and projections; they are not looking at the raw, hard facts.

I and this side of the chamber think that it's about time we start doing things differently and start thinking of ways we can help Australian families, looking at ways we can bring their power prices down. We may as well give this a go. We may as well give it a go because the rest of the world does it. They operate safely all around the world. Nuclear power plants have the lowest rate of fatalities of any form of power production around the world. We've got to manage the waste issues anyway. We are buying these nuclear subs, so we're going to have to deal with the waste issues anyway. If we don't fix this soon, I am worried that the principal purpose that these nuclear subs will have to be put to is when the inevitable renewable blackouts come, we'll have to park them in Sydney Harbour, go and get a long extension cord and plug them into the grid. That will be our only solution! Instead, we can build a nuclear power plant today and that will bring down power prices as well.