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

Billions of dollars going into wind farms over several years has been unable to prevent a drought in wind power generation this quarter that has surprised the market. Electricity generation from wind farms in the national electricity market since 1 April has been roughly flat compared to the same quarter from 2021. Despite billions of dollars in investment in wind farms, whereby the capacity in wind has increased by 50 per cent over the last four years, we have only seen a very small rise of 15 per cent in actual output. How can anyone predict the generation capacity of a wind farm when it is completely unreliable? You should be able to spend an extra dollar and get a fixed amount of increase of output for that extra dollar spent. This is the problem with unreliables: you cannot guarantee a return on your investment. We're finally starting to see the chickens come home to roost.

The other thing I want to discuss is last week's report by the Australian Institute of Marine Science on coral cover on the reef. I'm pleased to say that there is record coral cover for the second year in a row. UNESCO isn't going to put the reef on the endangered list as a result of this report, but that doesn't mean that UNESCO isn't going to stop dragnet fishing on the reef by 2027. They still demand that Australia spend billions of dollars for research on the reef and impose unfair conditions on land based activities along the reef. That is completely unfair. It is about time we stood up for our own sovereignty and stopped taking orders from UNESCO.