Malcolm Roberts (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As a servant to the people of Queensland and Australia, I wonder whether people know that Liberal, Labor, Nationals and Greens climate policies and renewables subsidies are costing households $13 billion per year—that's $1,300 per household every year. Thirty-nine per cent of household electricity bills are due to climate policies that have driven $8 billion in private sector malinvestment that is now destroying and destabilising base load power. These costs are the work of respected economist Dr Alan Moran, who used the government's data and thus cannot be sensibly refuted.

Energy intensive industries and value-adding food processing and minerals processing are moving to countries with cheap energy. China, India, and Asia use our high-quality clean coal to generate cheap power, while the same power from our clean coal under Australian climate policies has a price three times as high. In China and India, it's 8c per kilowatt hour. In Australia, it's 25c per kilowatt hour. Australia once had the world's cheapest electricity, yet now prices are among the world's highest. As a result, manufacturing dropped from 17 per cent of the national economy in the 1980s to now be just six per cent, and many hundreds of thousands of blue-collar jobs have been packed off overseas.

As a kid, I went to school in Kurri Kurri High School. I lived in the bush and cycled to school every day. Every morning and every afternoon we rode past the Kurri Kurri aluminium smelter. That was built because of cheap, reliable, stable, secure and environmentally responsible coal-fired power in the Hunter Valley. It's now shut due to climate policies driving power prices to double what they were just 10 years ago. Kaput! Gone! And, with it, hundreds—thousands—of jobs in the community.

Climate policies are ravaging agriculture after stealing farmers' rights to use their own land in compliance with the Kyoto protocol. This is destroying food security and increasing food prices for every Australian. High electricity prices are gutting manufacturing, gutting agriculture and gutting small and large businesses. Our nation's productive capacity, economic sovereignty and economic resilience are being decimated, turning our country from being independent to dependent on other nations. Climate alarmists are pushing policies aimed at fundamentally decarbonising the economy from 2050 onwards. Such a radical change, with its severe consequences for lifestyle, livelihoods and lives, should be based on extraordinary evidence. Empirical data from solid measurement and with specified, quantified impacts must first justify such fundamental change. High-cost policies, such as climate policies and renewable subsidies, need solid scientific evidence as justification for the policies, whose impacts must be specified before implementation and measured during implementation.

I'll discuss this next week, but for now I'll discuss the Moran report's insights into electricity prices. As I said, climate policies and renewable subsidies cost Australian households, via their electricity bills, $13 billion every year—that's $1,300 per household. The government claims it's just $90 per year. Dr Moran, using the government's own data, calculates that the direct costs are $536 per household per year. The total cost is $1,300 per year per household. The additional cost of climate policies on our power bills is a staggering 39 per cent, not the 6½ per cent which the government claims. The 6½ per cent covers the cost of federal and state mandatory requirements, such as the Renewable Energy Target, and excludes the cost of additional transmission lines—Snowy 2.0, which is going to be about $14 billion now—direct support from federal and state budgets and the cost of climate policies on the coal generation price. The true cost of electricity would be $13 billion per year less if cheap, affordable, reliable coal production were not lumbered with policies that distort the market towards expensive and unreliable wind and solar. Wind and solar power destroys jobs, kills productive capacity and wastes investment, as I will show in a minute.

I commissioned this report from the respected economist Dr Alan Moran. His is the first comprehensive and independent analysis of the full costs of climate policies on energy. It's difficult for the layman to find the costs because the government no longer puts this data out in a consolidated form. But Moran used the government's own data, and thus his report cannot be sensibly refuted. He has also been conservative, to ensure credibility. The government has stopped releasing data in a comprehensive form because it is hiding what the policy is doing to everyday Australians and our nation—high costs and future unreliability. Incrementally and deceitfully it is deliberately hiding these rising costs.

Artificially high electricity and energy prices savage our living standards and undermine our economic resilience and competitiveness. This is particularly important now with COVID recovery. Humans in the civilised world—the Western world, the developed world—have become independent of climate; independent of wind and independent of the sun. We now don't have the famines we used to have, but all of a sudden now we're going back to being dependent on climate—dependent on weather and dependent on wind and solar—at a cost to taxpayers of $8 billion per year in private investment. And that's still going on; after two decades they're still continuing to receive subsidies. These parasitic infants will never develop—it's impossible—and I will explain why in a minute. But renewables distort low-cost coal based power; they more than double the wholesale electricity price from $45.50 to $92.50 and we're all paying for it. After 20 years, renewables remain unviable without subsidies and are a parasitic investment, a 'malinvestment', in our energy systems.

For every subsidised so-called green energy job there are 2.2 to three jobs that could have been created elsewhere in the economy with the same subsidy or investment, and they're lost to the economy. Intermittent energies like wind and solar are parasitic and they're killing their host, just like parasites do. Their host is the people of Australia and Australia itself. The issue beyond that, though, is the lack of integrity, and government that has stopped serving the people and is milking the people for its mates investing in so-called renewable energy.

There's been a study in Australia called the Fisher study. It estimated the costs and impacts of Labor's 50 per cent renewable energy target policy. It estimated that it would lose Australian income of $1.2 trillion in the 10 years to 2030. That's more than half this year's gross domestic product! We're working for half the year to blow it all in the next 10 years. Labor's policy will drive and require an electricity price of $157 per megawatt hour. That's more than double what it was in 2016, before COVID hit and reduced prices. COVID reduced the price; this will double what it was before COVID. Plus—and this is something very important for Labor to understand—its policies will cut wages to 23 per cent below what they would have been, and there will be 568,000 fewer jobs. The biggest falls in employment will be in coal, oil and gas, and energy-intensive industries. As for the Liberals, they would increase intermittence 40 per cent above the current intermittent level, to about 48 per cent. That would be devastating. One Nation alone says: zero intermittence, no subsidies, get back to basics.

Green energy is no more likely to create additional employment and income than if workers with shovels and wheelbarrows replaced workers with heavy machinery in trucks and road building. Productivity is what enables higher wages and more jobs. It's easy to understand. In the United States it takes 39 solar workers to produce the same electricity as one natural gas worker. Choosing to employ 39 people to do what one person can do means 38 people cannot help elsewhere in the economy in providing care for the elderly, education, better infrastructure or thousands of other jobs and services. Solar and wind cut investment in the real economy because investments in wind and solar are wasted in tax and reduced spending. They destroy our competitiveness in the future. It's not happening in China, India, Indonesia and growing economies, which account for the vast majority of carbon dioxide production.

What we need to do is end all regulations and policies, including subsidies, that uniquely reward renewable energy. We need to remove weather dependency. Removing it is a key achievement of the last 170 years that's now being reversed. We need to get back to being independent of wind and solar—of weather. Above all, we need to be honest, to make policies based on facts and to share the data.