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

At the outset I want to congratulate Senator Van for pursuing this initiative. It's a very timely review. I think Australians want answers as to why they are paying so much for electricity in a land blessed with so many energy resources. We should have if not the lowest then some of the lowest energy prices in the world, given the high-quality coal, the gas, the hydro in some parts of our country, and the solar and wind assets we have, too. We have all this stuff, but we now suffer some of the highest power prices in the world, certainly much, much higher than in like countries, like the United States and Canada, who have similar resources to our own. I didn't mention uranium. I will mention uranium later. We've got lots of that, too.

So, I congratulate Senator Van. It's a shame the inquiry was not done earlier in this parliament's time. It's a shame it did not go for longer. I think we could have asked more questions and had more hearings on this—lots of follow-up questions. While, as I said, I think Australians want answers on this topic, I'm not so sure we got the answer about why we're paying so much for energy in this country from those who are running the system today.

I support the recommendations Senator Van has gone through in his report. It's timely to do some more reviews on this. Certainly the so-called integrated system plan needs some reform, and I want to add further to that. I had some additional comments in the report that cover a range of topics, but I would sayat the outset that the integrated system plan—the ISP, as it's become known—is broken. It is broken, and either it needs to be radically fixed or we scrap it all and start again.

The ISP is a relatively new phenomenon. It's not something that's been with us from time immemorial. It effectively came out of what became known as the Finkel review, which followed the statewide blackout—the 'black event'—that occurred in South Australia in 2016. The Finkel review recommended some kind of coordinated planning document. We've done stuff like this before, but the idea was to plan our transmission network in a coordinated way to reduce costs for Australians. Well, on that measure of reducing costs, the ISP certainly hasn't done that.

Of course, we're getting up to nearly 10 years since 2016 and the South Australian blackout, and all that's happened is that our power prices keep going up and up, and every summer—and winter too—we seem to have an increasing number of blackout warnings. Sometimes there is loss of power to people. We do not have a reliable or an affordable system, and it's not working for Australians.

One of the reasons why the ISP, or this planning process, is failing is that it has been corrupted and co-opted by politicians. It was meant to be somewhat independent, with just a bunch of engineers—boffins—running the numbers and presenting them to their political masters. Instead, what's happened is that the ISP now operates under a number of severe constraints imposed on them by the politicians, which effectively makes their results useless in comparison to other policies.

If you follow the public energy debate, you'll now quite often see and hear people like Minister Bowen and even some of the energy regulators, who seem to have drunk the Kool-Aid, saying that the ISP shows that the current proposal, to move to an almost exclusively wind and solar renewable system, is the 'least cost pathway'. They often use that exact term: the 'least cost pathway'. The average Australians listening to that, along with senators from all the sides involved in this debate, seem to operate under the confused belief that somehow that means the pathway the regulators have chosen, the ISP that the politicians have decided to pursue, is the least costly of all options—that it actually has the lowest costs of all the options. In my report, I quote Minister Bowen in his press releases where he baldly says, 'The ISP shows that my plan for wind and solar is the least cost pathway.' That's not what it means at all. If you read the footnotes of the report—and as all the regulators admitted to Senator Van's inquiry—that's not what they do at all.

What they do is assume that in 2030 we'll have 82 per cent of our grid powered by renewable energy. They shoot first and then go back to ask questions about how to get to that 82 per cent. It would be right and correct for Minister Bowen to say, 'It's the least cost pathway to get to my target of 82 per cent.' That's what they're trying to show. It's not right or correct to leave off those words, to say 'it's the least cost pathway' and leave it there and put a full stop after it—as Minister Bowen and Mr Westerman, the head of the Energy Market Operator, regularly do in our nation's media.

I didn't make it a formal recommendation, but my first finding was that it would be good if those in positions of authority in our energy debate accurately described to the Australian people what they do. These are misleading statements at best. They are misleading to the Australian people, and what is clear from the evidence to our committee is that people like Mr Westerman know they are misleading, yet they continue to put out there the idea that somehow the work they are doing shows that 82 per cent renewables by 2030 is the right idea and that net zero emissions by 2050 is lower cost than coal. It does not show that at all.

My second recommendation is that we do a proper report. Let's do it. Let's change the ISP, so that we do evaluate what it would look like if we removed the 82 per cent renewables by 2030 target. What would the costs be if we did that? What transmission lines would need to be built? What trees would need to be bulldozed? What people's properties would have to be run through? Let's look at that, and then we can have a proper comparison between two different alternatives. Let's run a scenario with nuclear. That's not done under the ISP. The CSIRO does not do that. They do not do a total system cost analysis of nuclear power. Let's do that in the ISP. What is the government afraid of? If they're so confident in what they say regularly in this place and out in the media—that nuclear's so expensive—then run the numbers. What have you got to be afraid of? Let's make that reform.

On that, we should remove the nuclear ban. I've only got a few minutes left, but it is absolutely nonsensical for the country with the largest uranium reserves in the world to continue to ban a form of power that the rest of the world is rushing towards. They're rushing towards it, so why are we banning it?