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

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answers given by ministers to all questions without notice asked today.

In particular, I'd like to talk about electricity prices. As we just heard Senator McGrath point out, electricity prices have risen 21½ per cent since the Albanese government came to office and gas prices have risen by 22 per cent. Of course, this is just one of many broken promises made by the Albanese Labor government at the last election. They said that they would lower energy prices by $275.

The Labor government is unable to explain how they are going to lower energy prices. There's a very simple reason why they can't lower energy prices, and that is because they are obsessed with this renewable energy target of getting renewables to power 82 per cent of the grid by 2030. Anyone who understands anything about reliable energy, baseload energy and the ability to have energy on call—let's call it dispatchable energy—knows that you cannot build transmission lines and batteries, recycle all of this stuff, buy all the land where you're going to have to put these smaller generation plants, such as solar farms, wind farms et cetera, and then expect to manage it all.

Thirty years ago, we effectively had 30 coal-fired power stations on the eastern seaboard of Australia that provided about 90 per cent of the energy. Those power stations could run at any time during the day, and they weren't subject to market manipulation because they also happened to be publicly owned. They would just run on demand as the demand was required at a small profit to make sure that those profits could then go back into keeping the power stations going. I'm pleased to say that Queensland was one of the few states—if not the only state—that didn't actually sell their coal-fired power stations.

I have to admit that that was very lucky. I well remember under the Bligh-Beattie government that Anna Bligh, when she was the Treasurer and then Premier, went on an infrastructure privatisation spree the likes of which we have never seen and the likes of which Queensland has never recovered from. I am pleased to say that we didn't sell the coal-fired power stations, because today they provide billions of dollars in revenue to the Queensland government. When things go awry with renewable energy—and they will eventually—at least we know that we've got our power stations to keep us going in Queensland. Of course, that's notwithstanding the fact that Callide C blew up a couple of years ago because of the lack of maintenance and repairs on that power station. The Queensland Labor government have done everything they can to avoid taking responsibility for that.

In the short time I have left, let me give a bit of gratuitous advice to the Labor Party on how to deal with lowering power costs immediately. I call on you to abolish this fantasy of yours that you are going to have 80 per cent of renewable energy in the grid by 2030. You're not going to do it. You can't even get the Snowy Hydro project built, and that's a big part. Even though I say it's a big part, it's a big part of a very small part to reach that target. What you need to do is to go out to near my home town and build yourselves two power stations at the Kogan Creek Power Station. There's 400 million tonnes of coal out there that belongs to the Queensland people. That won't cost anything to buy. It's a very shallow coalmine that has a very low stripping ratio. You can get out there, dig up the coal and put it straight into the coal-fired power plants. I'll acknowledge that that was the last public coal-fired power station that was built by a Queensland government, under Peter Beattie. I'll call on that former Queensland MP sitting there very quietly, Senator Watt.