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

Today, the Queensland government has announced that it plans to waste 780 million taxpayers' dollars on building a useless wind farm, when we already have too much unreliable energy in Australia. This winter we only kept the lights on because we made the factories shut down. We put people out of jobs just to keep lights on. We did not have enough power because we have shut over four gigawatts of reliable power—mainly coal—and replaced it with weather-dependent energy.

The Queensland government trumpets today that its new $780 million wind farm will power 280,000 homes but it will only do that when the wind blows, which is only about a third of the time. The other two-thirds of the time, we will be left in the dark. For $780 million, this project will create just 15 permanent jobs. That comes in at $52 million per job—great deal. But wait, there's a lot more. The Queensland government does not have $780 million, so they're going to have to borrow $780 million. So the plan is that we're going to borrow millions more from the Chinese government to buy Chinese-built wind turbines so that we can destroy our local manufacturing industry and give China more of our jobs. What a great deal for the people of Queensland!

That will be the outcome here, because Europe has already tried this failed strategy and it's failed catastrophically there. Europe has lost almost a quarter of its aluminium capacity thanks to an overreliance on renewable energy. You cannot run the Boyne Island aluminium smelter near Gladstone on a weather-dependent power system. There are thousands of Queensland jobs now at risk because of the Queensland government's ill-thought-through energy policy.

If the Queensland government were serious about jobs and about reducing carbon emissions, they would be building clean coal, gas and nuclear power plants. We have all of that energy under our feet and all of those resources here but we refuse to use it, which is a national crime. We are not using our own God-given energy resources. Instead, we rely on imported solar and wind turbines that will cost us much of our manufacturing industry and cost all Australians more for their basic power needs.