Dorinda Cox (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The President has received the following letter from Senator McDonald:

That, in the opinion of the Senate, the following is a matter of urgency:

The failure of the Albanese Government to secure affordable and reliable energy, as highlighted in Australian Energy Market Operator's 2023 Electricity Statement of Opportunities, which is resulting in Australians paying some of the most expensive energy bills in the world for increasingly unreliable power.

Is the proposal supported?

More than the number of senators required by the standing orders having risen in their places—

Susan McDonald (Queensland, National Party, Shadow Minister for Resources) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That, in the opinion of the Senate, the following is a matter of urgency:

The failure of the Albanese Government to secure affordable and reliable energy, as highlighted in Australian Energy Market Operator's 2023 Electricity Statement of Opportunities, which is resulting in Australians paying some of the most expensive energy bills in the world for increasingly unreliable power.

One of the great truisms of government, as well as of business, is that a failure to plan is a plan to fail, and that is exactly what the Albanese government has delivered for Australians. The Albanese Labor government promised Australian households—not once, not twice but 97 times—that it would reduce electricity prices by $275. Not only has the government broken this promise, broken its trust with Australians, but electricity prices are continuing to spiral out of control. It is not just in the home that we're seeing recent increases of around $500; now small businesses are also being hit with these terrific uncapped costs. Businesses tell me, as they would be telling members of this government, that they don't have a choice as to whether or not to pay rent, to pay for electricity, to pay for the insurance. So, what do they have to do? They have to cut wages costs. They have to cut the things they can manage. And that is bad for their business.

This is an extraordinarily bad business government, and it threatens the 30 per cent of people around this nation who are employed in small business. I have a been told that one in 10 Australians are already unable to pay their electricity bills, and it's going to get worse, because this is a dangerous pathway. It's dangerous for households, it's dangerous for business and it's dangerous for all Australians, given that we live in a nation of extraordinary resources. One of our great growth periods was when we tapped into our terrific coal and gas resources to have affordable—in fact, cheap—electricity. It allowed us to invest into manufacturing, into agricultural production, into mining. This is something Labor fails to understand.

In my recent 2½ weeks in Western Australia I saw project after project that has been crippled by a lack of energy supply. Whether they're trying to hook up renewable projects to transmission lines that don't exist or whether they're trying to negotiate the connection of new power sources, they are paying tens of millions of dollars—money that should be going to more employment in their business, to more contractors, to more small businesses for their local-buy content. Instead, it is being wasted on trying to secure what should be our greatest resource: affordable electricity.

There is no plan under Labor to transition to renewable energy—not in a way that is in any way affordable for Australians. I can see those on the other side laughing. Well, they're not paying the bills that mean that people are choosing whether to go ahead with their business, whether to keep people employed. 'Blackout Bowen', the minister from the other house, must be the most incompetent minister of his generation. His failure to manage the energy system, his failure to continue supplying the very affordable, reliable electricity that Australians were able to enjoy means that Labor's energy plan—Australia's baseload power—is shutting down faster than it can be replaced, increasing the risk of blackouts as soon as this summer. Do you know what that means? It means households and businesses are buying generators and filling them up with diesel in order to ensure that they have the basics that we expect for our lives—to be able to keep the fridge on, to be able to keep food safe, to be able to keep an air-conditioner on in a home or, if you have a medical condition, to be able to keep yourself plugged in.

This is an extraordinary situation from a government who should be taking responsibility for Australians but instead gives us this grand rhetoric. These renewable energy projects have instead been stalled. Australians are angry, and rightly so, because they are being sold out by this Labor government—sold out when there is no need for it.

Nita Green (Queensland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I'm always very pleased to stand in the Senate and talk about energy and talk about our policies as a government, because only an Albanese Labor government is implementing overdue policy reform to deliver cheaper, cleaner, more-reliable energy to our system. And it is difficult to take seriously a motion from a party that led a decade of denial, a decade of delay and a decade of leadership spills based purely on an ideological view that they couldn't settle an energy policy. They had 22 energy policies and three leadership spills—four if you want to throw the Nationals in too—all because they couldn't agree on what we needed to do to fix our energy market, and now they want to come in here and talk to Australians about affordable and reliable energy when we know that for over a decade they failed to do what was required.

While the former government put their heads in the sand and ignored repeated calls to bring on new supply and transmission, we are acting to ensure Australia's energy grid is fit for purpose for the 21st century. When it comes to power bills, we took urgent action to shield Australian families and businesses from the worst of global energy price spikes. Our energy bill relief rebates were targeted to more than five million households doing it the toughest and will provide additional hundreds of dollars off bills for everyday Australians. That is energy price bill rebate relief that those opposite voted against. They voted in this chamber for higher energy prices for Australians doing it tough, and now they want to come in here and pretend that they care about those very Australians and energy bills they are receiving.

I'm glad that we've had an opportunity to talk about AEMO's 2023 electricity statement of opportunities, which was released last week, because the report was clear, despite the misinformation you might hear today from those opposite, about the Albanese government's plan to turbocharge renewables, which is even more critical than ever following a decade of coalition energy inaction and neglect. The report clearly outlines that the federal and state government policies, including Rewiring the Nation and the Capacity Investment Scheme, are more important than ever, more important than ever to increase supply and reduce the risk of shortfalls across the country. This is an important report and it's one that our government is taking seriously.

It begs the question. I thought, 'Surely this isn't the first time we've seen a report like this published by the energy market regulator,' and it's not. In 2017 the same report was published, and it said that it confirmed the need for additional investments and new approaches to ensure AEMO has a reliable portfolio of dispatchable energy. In 2017 they said that, but did the Liberal-National do anything? Well, I think they were preparing to spill another leadership, but they didn't do anything to make sure that we had dispatchable power. In 2018 the same report was released with the same request for more reliable energy, and those opposite did nothing in government. In 2019 the same report said there was a continued elevated risk of expected unserved energy over the next 10 years as well as forecast tight electricity supply and demand conditions in several states for the upcoming summer, and those in government did nothing in response to that report. The same report in 2020 called for the same risk to be managed, and in 2021 the same report said the NEM will need more generation, storage and transmission than is currently operating, and what did those opposite do? They rolled Michael McCormack when Scott Morrison was looking likely to commit to net zero. That's how those opposite have approached these reports. Our government is approaching this report in a completely different way: by making sure that, when it comes to affordable and reliable energy, our government has the policies and is making the investment to fix the mess left by a decade of division and denial from those opposite.

When it comes to reducing energy bills, those opposite are pursuing the most expensive form of power—nuclear—which will take the longest to build. How's that Collinsville Power Station, Senator Hughes? Have we built the Collinsville Power Station yet, Senator Canavan? We took action to provide bill relief when we were given the chance, but those opposite voted against it.

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

The government's plan is to close every coal-fired power station in Australia and replace the dispatchable power they provide with the electricity generated by a combination of solar, wind and stored green hydrogen. What could go wrong? Let's look at South Australia, where the plan is most advanced—so they think! Electricity prices in the state are the highest in Australia, and are increasing at a faster rate than anywhere else in the country. Much of South Australia's energy comes from wind and solar, but in the second quarter of 2023 this required back-up from gas 36 per cent of the time. In short, almost two million people in South Australia would have a been subject to rolling blackouts without natural gas. South Australia's current energy situation represents the future every other state is moving towards, in what can only be called an 'economic suicide pact'. If not coal, gas is essential to back up solar or wind generated electricity but, despite having some of the largest reserves of gas in the world, it's in very short supply in Australia. We keep exporting too much of it and foreigners pay far less for Australian gas than we do. My bill to create a domestic gas reserve, which I have introduced today, would guarantee supply and lower prices.

I now want to return to the government's plan to replace gas with green hydrogen. It's a plan that exists on a paper napkin, pie-in-the-sky stuff, and we have all been there before—namely, with the NDIS. There is no business plan for any part of the hydrogen idea, including restarting the national electricity grid following a major blackout. How do I know that? In September 2016, the first statewide blackout happened in South Australia. The state could not restart its own grid because there was no power to pressurise the gas into a turbine. The power came from an old coal-fired power station in Victoria, one of the few still operating and not being blown up yet. When all the coal-fired power stations are closed, what will we do to restart the grid? The government says that Snowy 2.0 will come to the rescue but, personally, I would recommend all households keep a supply of candles. The project has come to a complete standstill, with the tunnelling machine stuck for more than a year and no resolution in sight. This project is facing a blowout now estimated at $12 billion, thanks to poor policy and business planning.

Before I finish, I want to talk about the plan for green hydrogen to replace natural gas. Again, no business plans are available. This year the government announced $2 billion for the National Hydrogen Strategy, without a business plan or any modelling. This was either brave or stupid. The only beneficiary of the government's subsidy will be billionaire Andrew Forrest. Oh, yes—is he a 'yes' campaigner? Yes! Unless you can produce hydrogen for less than $2 a kilogram, it will never stack up economically. Labor in South Australia has committed more than $600 million to a green hydrogen plant at Whyalla, again without a business case. What could go wrong? The same as what happened to the state in 2016.

Australians need to wake up to green energy fantasies invented by emotionally driven climate change activists and children brainwashed through our educational system, who say the world is coming to an end—fantasies that are not even remotely based on evidence or science but on the vote and financial gains. These are pipedreams driven by green fearmongering. They sound wonderful and they sound too good to be true. That's because they're not true. And the ones who will end up paying for it all with more taxes and record high energy prices will be the Australian people. It looks like we'll have to give up those creamy barista coffees and go back to opening tins of grandma's International Roast! And we'll have to sacrifice a great deal more on the altar of the climate change cult. The people of Australia are fed up with paying the rising costs in electricity. It irks me to hear the Labor Party blame the coalition for the escalating prices in electricity when Labor keep putting 28,000 kilometres of power lines across the country, against the will of the people of this nation, because they're pushing their own agenda that doesn't stack up.

People understand that electric cars won't stack up because we don't have the minerals in this nation after more than one generation to build electric cars. So they're going to control the people in this nation, but the fact is they're destroying this nation. The Greens and the Labor Party are destroying the people of this nation.

Hollie Hughes (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Climate Change and Energy) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The anticipation! And I'm a bit disappointed I'm following Senator Hanson; I was fired up to follow Senator Green, and the amount of rubbish that we hear coming from the other side. But then I hear sense coming from Senator Hanson at the far end of the chamber and I start to breathe again. I would like to thank Senator Hanson for getting me worked up again when she mentioned we may not be able to get a coffee anymore—back to International Roast. I can tell you, that is not happening.

James McGrath (Queensland, Liberal National Party, Shadow Assistant Minister to the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

There is nothing wrong with International Roast!

Hollie Hughes (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Climate Change and Energy) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator McGrath, I mean, I know we love a Cheerio and a little cubed cheese, but one has to draw the line somewhere. To hear Senator Green come here and talk about the plans they had and all those wonderful things they were going to deliver through energy. They were going to deliver, if you noticed—anyone playing along at home—hundreds of dollars of savings off the bill. I thought I would remind Senator Green it was $297. That was how much those opposite were going to take off everybody's power bills. Unfortunately, it hasn't quite happened that way. In fact, if you talk to any Australian out there—and we actually do on this side speak to real Australians, particularly Australians who run small businesses who employ people—there isn't a person whose power bill has not gone up. Businesses and Australian households are facing power bills with increases of significantly more than $297 a year, so at no point will we ever see those bills come down.

Thank you, Senator McDonald, for your motion this evening, but we are here to look at the AEMO report, which is interesting. But what is more interesting is when you line it up next to the GenCost report that this government now relies on so heavily. We have Minister Bowen—'blackout Bowen' as he should potentially be known—in the other place whose nickname I heard on 2GB the other day was 'Casanova'. I had a think about it and it is because of everything he touches—

Sue Lines (President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Brown, on a point of order?

Carol Brown (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Infrastructure and Transport) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I ask that Senator Hughes withdraw that reflection on Minister Bowen. She knows quite well that she needs to refer to people in the other place by their appropriate titles.

Sue Lines (President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I will remind you, Senator Hughes, that I know you were quoting from the radio, but that is also inappropriate, so if you would withdraw the comment without reference to it.

Hollie Hughes (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Climate Change and Energy) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I will withdraw, but I need some guidance, because I'm repeating what a nickname is. I'm happy to refer to him as 'Mr Bowen'. Am I allowed to say what his nickname is, or are we not allowed to reference it?

Sue Lines (President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Brown, I'm in control of the Senate.

Hollie Hughes (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Climate Change and Energy) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

How would you—

Sue Lines (President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! Across the chamber.

Hollie Hughes (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Climate Change and Energy) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I'm trying to get a direction.

Sue Lines (President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Excuse me, Senator Hughes, when I explained and asked you to withdraw, I also explained to you that it went to references used in other places—that is, on the radio. So I will ask you to withdraw the comment without making any reference to it.

Hollie Hughes (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Climate Change and Energy) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I withdraw. If you listen to Ben Fordham on Radio 2GB, he has a particular name for Minister Bowen and it's really quite funny. I believe it's Ray Hadley who coined the name, which is particularly funny. I will guide you there, since apparently I'm not allowed to reference anything said anywhere. Minister Bowen, I have noticed, is building an industry. We noticed that he said he was going to build solar. He needed solar panels and wind. He needed 22,000 solar panel panels to be built every day and 40 wind turbines every month. When asked at estimates at the beginning of this year—81 days since he made the claims—the department couldn't tell us how many they produced; they only acknowledged they were well behind schedule. We now know there would need to be up to somewhere like eight million a year. They would need to have put in 300,000 by now. We know that at no stage has that been reached.

The industry that Mr Bowen is building—anyone who is a bit of an online investor, share trader, maybe have a look—is the candle industry. I bought some the other day. I will make sure I put them in a cupboard and will probably look to buy a few more, because we are reasonably sure, as summer approaches, and particularly since Queensland is already having a pretty hot day, that we might need a few candles as the blackouts roll out. Senator Hanson just frightened us all by saying that there will be no coffee machine going and we will all be on International Roast, that there will be no Netflix. You won't be at home on your iPad, having it charged up with your Wi-Fi working; no, you will be sitting by a candle. It will be a romantic candlelit evening on a hot summer's night because the power will have gone out because the wind won't be blowing and the sun won't be shining. The demonisation of those opposite of the gas industry is unbelievable. To hear Senator Green go on—here's a little reminder for you all that sit opposite. You're the government. You can say whatever you like about what happened eight, nine or 10 years ago. Well done. Well done, people. We can all do Rudd-Gillard-Rudd too. We were all there at that time as well. But, let me tell you, they are not—

Raff Ciccone (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Abbott, Turnbull—

Hollie Hughes (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Climate Change and Energy) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Listen, Senator Ciccone, you interject there, and all interjections, I may remind you, are disorderly.

Raff Ciccone (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Not all of them.

Hollie Hughes (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Climate Change and Energy) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

They're all disorderly, Senator Ciccone. But they won't be naming Tony Abbott when it's 42 degrees and the aircon's not working because the wind and solar aren't working. They'll be blaming Mr Albanese and Minister Bowen.

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

It pains me greatly to have to rise to speak to this motion today. To think that Australia is now paying for some of the most expensive energy in the world is a complete and utter tragedy. It is the combination of decades of mismanagement of our energy system, no doubt by none other than AEMO, because we have this half-breed Frankenstein set-up of an energy market in this country, where we have the federal government, the state government and the private sector all responsible for electricity. As anyone who works in the private sector knows, when everyone is in charge, nobody is in charge. If we want to fix this, we should go back to the origins of our Constitution and put the states back in charge of energy.

The reason why I'm very passionate about that is, when I grew up in the great state of Queensland, Queensland had some of the cheapest energy in the world. That was under the great leadership of Joh Bjelke-Petersen. I know some of you will go, 'What about the brown paper bags?' Let me tell you: the black tape, the green tape and the red tape are just a legitimised form of corruption in this country, and it's out of control. We got the cheapest energy because we opened up coalmines. We used our natural resources. Yet, here, today, we refuse to use our natural resources. We would rather import renewables from foreign countries than use our own energy here in this country.

I've referred to this many times before in this chamber. Near my hometown of Chinchilla, at the Kogan Creek power station, is 400 million tonnes of coal. That is right there, just below the surface, and the only cost of it is getting it out of the ground and transporting it one or two kilometres to the actual power station. There's also another pad there where you could build another turbine to power Queensland forward. But do we do that? No. I'd like to commend the media statement put out by the member for Fairfax, where he called on the Labor government to scrap its ideological approach to energy. I can't agree with that more, because it is this ideological approach, that somehow CO2 is going to cause global boiling, that is at the heart of this problem.

For the last three or four decades we have been living in the Middle Ages, where knowledge has been completely thrown out the door and replaced by fear, fearmongering and superstition. The reason why we live in such a great country here, with such a high standard of living, is because of the Enlightenment, when scientists went and put down and defined the laws of science. Those laws of science demonstrated, and quantified, cause and effect. If we're going to put this climate change rubbish to bed, we need to go back to basics. We need to sort out our education system and we need to start teaching maths and science again.

This whole so-called crisis can easily be quantified, because CO2 is a gas. Is there a law for the relationship between gas and temperature? Yes, there is. It's called the ideal gas law. It's called PV equals NRT: pressure times volume equals the number of moles by the ideal gas constant by the temperature. I want to know why no-one has ever discussed this before. It's very easy, if you use that algorithm. If carbon dioxide increases by 100 parts a million, that is a one in ten thousand increase. All you have to do is go one in ten thousand by the current temperature of the earth, which is 287 degrees Kelvin, and you get a rise of 0.0287 degrees. All you have to then do is take the specific density of carbon dioxide, which is 1.53, and times that by 2.87 and you get the formula. For every 100 parts per million increase in carbon dioxide you will increase the temperature by 0.043 degrees. Given that carbon dioxide has increased by 140 parts per million, or about by 0.06 degrees, in the last 140 years, I think that is a price worth paying to have brought billions and billions of people out of the dark ages and into the world we live in today. If we're going to stop this rubbish and go back to baseload energy, we need to kill the myth that somehow climate change is going to cause global boiling and bring the world to an end.

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

The chickens are coming home to roost. There is no doubt about that. Over the last decade or so we have madly persisted on seeking to turn our energy system into one that is almost completely reliant on the weather and we're now left with the absurd situation where two Labor state governments in our biggest states announced over the last week that they will subsidise coal-fired power stations. That's the farce that our energy system has descended into. After a decade or so of saying that we don't need coal-fired power anymore because we've got the wind and the sun is free—it's all going to be rainbows and unicorns—we now have the situation where we're having to subsidise old inefficient coal-fired power stations in both New South Wales and Victoria just to keep the lights on.

What is absolutely and abundantly clear now is that the path we're on is a path to ruination as a nation. The path we're on is a path to higher power bills. The path we're on is a path to losing our jobs and our manufacturing industries to other nations who are not as silly as us.

We have been installing solar and wind energy at a rate four times higher per person than North America and Europe. I often hear from the other side that the former government didn't invest enough in solar and wind or in renewable power, but how much is enough? We're running at a rate four times higher than Europe and North America. No country is going further and faster down this route than Australia, and the results are all around us to see.

The other thing I often hear from government senators and members of the other place is that the former government failed because four gigawatts of baseload power came out of the system over that decade or so and only one gigawatt was installed to replace it. That is true. That is a fair criticism of energy policy over the past 10 or so years. A lack of planning and foresight led to the fact that we have almost exclusively relied on power options that we can't rely on all the time. They're not baseload power. Solar and wind certainly are not. Some other forms of power, such as gas peaking plants, are not.

We have shut down our power stations that could run 24 hours a day and we are left with things that run only some of the time. Solar and wind power are basically the dole bludgers of the energy system—they only turn up to work when they want to; they're not there all the time for us—whereas our baseload coal-fired power stations and our hydro, generally speaking, as long as there is enough rain are there for us whenever we need them.

We need to desperately fix that three-gigawatt gap. It has actually grown further since the new government was elected. We just shut down the Liddell coal-fired power station. It was originally 1,600 megawatts and 1,200 megawatts when it shut. So we are down something like four to 4½ gigawatts of power compared to a decade or so ago. Where are we filling that gap from? Nothing the government is doing right now is filling that gap. For all their rhetoric about how terrible the former government was in taking our baseload power, they're doing absolutely nothing to fix that very same gap that they identify in their rhetoric.

There are no baseload power projects that the government is backing right now. There's a gas peaking plant in Newcastle. Who knows what's happening with that? They're not very happy with that. They seem to be going on the go-slow with that. That's not baseload. There is the Snowy Hydro scheme, which is mired in cost blowouts. It may never happen. We're probably not going to see it this decade. So where is the solution? The Australian people are sick and tired of the politics that are being played on this issue. They're paying for it in their higher power bills.

I'm standing here saying the coalition government didn't get it all right but certainly the Labor government is not doing anything to fix it. It's time for us to get real and fix it, and that means—it's a very simple response here—we need to build power stations that are on all the time. That is coal, that is gas, and in the future it could be nuclear as well. Let's get on with building them. I've been saying this for a long, long time. When I first started really campaigning for this, in about 2016, I was told: 'It will take too long to build a coal-fired power station, Matt. It's going to take us five or six years.' Well, it's been longer than that since I started saying this, and the responses we did come up with, like Snowy Hydro, are possibly still a decade away.

Let's get on. The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, no doubt about that, but the second-best time is today. We should stop the politics, stop the rot, stop the excuses and actually build things that work, that we know can save our jobs, that we know can keep our lights on and, most importantly of all, that we know can get power bills down so Australian families can actually manage their budgets.

Sue Lines (President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The question is that the motion as moved by Senator McDonald be agreed to.