David Fawcett (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answers given by the Minister for Foreign Affairs (Senator Wong) to questions without notice asked by Opposition senators today.

I'd like to start off with the question from Senator Hume to Minister Wong about inflation, where Senator Hume highlighted that interest rates remain at a 12-year high, core inflation is now on the rise again at 4.4 per cent, rents have gone up and the price of food, housing, electricity and insurance has gone up. Some of those prices have gone up to the extent that the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission said that some 273,337 households were struggling to pay their electricity bills, which is a rise of 43,000 from the same period last year. That's an 18 per cent increase in the number of Australians who are falling over a financial cliff because of the policies of this government.

What does the government do? We heard in the response today about bill relief that they were providing and about that, if it weren't for their measures, Australians would be paying more. That's like saying we've put a six-inch little step at the bottom of a cliff and you would have fallen further if it weren't for our intervention. What Australians really want is not a bandaid. They want a long-term plan that won't just give us better figures ahead of the next election. To go back to Abraham Lincoln, he believed a politician looks at just the next election and a statesman looks at the next generation. We should be looking at how we put in place a long-term plan that will benefit Australia by having sustainable, cheaper, cleaner and consistent energy into the future. Those opposite, in the middle of that discussion around the impact of inflation—including, at the core of it, rising electricity costs—claimed that the coalition's plan is going to be the most expensive form of electricity, but what they don't tell you is that their own plan, Mr Albanese's plan, to have a system which is completely reliant on renewable energy, is actually going to be the most expensive. That's not my claim; that's the conclusion of a study done by the University of Melbourne, the University of Queensland and Princeton University called Net Zero Australia. They highlight that, in the short term, it'll be some $1.2 trillion to $1.5 trillion to have a renewables based system put in place and, by 2060, some $7 trillion to $9 trillion.

What does that look like in the future? If you search 'renewable energy' in South Australia, my home state, you'll see claim after claim about the fact that South Australia is leading the transition in terms of energy, and yet South Australia has some of the highest power prices in the world—and certainly some of the highest here in Australia. Let me give you a comparison. In Ontario, a province in Canada, they're paying 14c per kilowatt hour. In Korea, they pay around 16c per kilowatt hour. In South Australia, we pay 45.54c per kilowatt—a massive increase. What are some of the things that Ontario and Korea have in common? In Korea, they have a nuclear industry, and that has brought power prices down. In Ontario, 60 per cent of their energy comes from nuclear generation, and they pay 14c versus South Australia's 45c per kilowatt hour. But the thing that those opposite won't acknowledge is not only how expensive their renewables-only plan is to achieve—the fact that it's on a trajectory to ever-increasing power prices, which is putting people over the cliff—but also the reality forecast by people like the International Energy Agency in the OECD that nuclear is better. Also, the experience of Finland, which in April this year opened up the OL3 nuclear plant, was that as soon as that came online there was a reduction of 75 per cent in their power prices.

So the theory of expert bodies like the IEA and OECD says that the long-term plan that will give us cleaner, cheaper, more consistent power is nuclear, and the lived experience of places like Ontario, Korea and Finland highlight that that is the way to get cleaner, cheaper and more consistent power for Australians.