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

If you've been following the energy policy debate in this country, you would've had to be half asleep to have not regularly heard the words 'renewable energy is the cheapest form of power'—it's the constant mantra of those that have been in control of our energy system for about a decade now. Time and time again, there seems to be this disconnect: we say that renewable energy is the cheapest form of power; yet the more renewable energy is installed, the higher everyone's power prices go.

We saw the latest chapter in this fiasco last week, when the Queensland government announced that it would pay an undisclosed sum to one of the biggest companies in this country, Rio Tinto, to keep the Gladstone aluminium smelter alive. That smelter employs a thousand Australians, easily, and 3,000 or 4,000 other Australians' jobs rely on that smelter. It's a massive facility that underpins the economy of Gladstone.

Rio Tinto, over the past four or five years, have said that they would try and switch their aluminium production in Australia to a hundred per cent renewable energy. Now, if renewable energy is the cheapest form of power, these would be happy days for the people of Gladstone and for the people in our manufacturing sector, because clearly this would help them underpin and continue their production of aluminium, if it's so cheap. Yet an amount of money is being paid to Rio Tinto—and we don't know how much it is—that, according to media reports from the News press last week, could relate to the subsidy of energy costs for the power-hungry smelter. Why do they need subsidies for energy costs if they're installing the cheapest form of power? They're replacing coal-fired power, in this case, in Gladstone, with wind and solar, but they need a subsidy. It doesn't make any sense. And why can't we know how big is this subsidy to one of the biggest companies in this country? The green energy scam continues apace, and all of us are paying for it.