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

In the last few years lots of us in North Queensland have heard Labor politicians promise us that there will be a utopia of new hydrogen jobs coming through for us within years. Indeed, two years ago almost to the day, the Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, came up to North Queensland and said:

Renewable hydrogen can be used as a transport fuel, for energy, and in manufacturing.

Producing it here will help Australia become a renewable energy superpower, exporting power to the world.

A lot of people in Central Queensland and other parts of the country where these promises have been made are now asking: where are these hydrogen jobs?

Just two weeks after the Prime Minister made that comment two years ago, the New York based company Plug Power pulled out of Fortescue's Gladstone hydrogen project, citing higher costs. It was an early warning sign. Since then, six other major projects in Australia have failed. There was the ATCO clean energy project in WA. Origin's Hunter Valley hydrogen hub has ended. There was the HyEnergy project in Gascoyne in Western Australia. The Kawasaki Gippsland hydrogen project is gone. Just the other day BP announced it is ending its $1 billion Kwinana hydrogen project. Kansai pulled out last year from the Central Queensland hydrogen project, a project backed by Stanwell. Just this week, the Queensland government has also put another nail in its coffin, saying it won't chuck in the $1.2 billion that Stanwell need to continue.

When are we going to get some reality here? People are sick and tired of being fibbed to and having misleading statements and fairytales sold to them as reality. This was never going to happen. Either the Labor Party knew it wasn't going to happen and still told people these fairytales or they were silly enough to believe it would happen when all the evidence showed that hydrogen was not ready for prime time.

When we were in government—and I say all this as the resources minister at the time—we launched the nation's first hydrogen strategy, but we took a much more measured approach in our strategy. We outlined that we didn't expect any exports of hydrogen from Australia, or nothing of a major note, until 2030 or well after 2030. It was clearly the evidence then, and it is now, that the cost of producing hydrogen is nowhere near the level such that there will be large buyers of it any time soon. In our national hydrogen strategy, we concentrated on investing in research activities, as you would do with a technology that is still developing—trying to lower the cost of that. We invested $146 million. I would say that was a fair investment but nothing close to the astronomical $14 billion that this government has put towards these white elephant hydrogen projects, wasting taxpayer dollars, wasting people's time and giving people false hope to hide its broader plans to pull support from the coal industry and walk away from the jobs there.

They sold this on a promise. Why would politicians run around spruiking these fairytales which were clearly untrue? It doesn't make a lot of sense except if you remember that, at the time the Labor Party adopted this policy, they were under huge political pressure over the fact that they couldn't support the coal industry in Central Queensland and the Hunter Valley, walking away from those jobs because they were too much in bed with the Greens. So they instead deserted coalminers, people who have supported them for years, an industry that's supported them for years and deserves better, and ran around telling this fairytale, saying: 'It's okay, guys and girls. You will get a job in hydrogen if you vote for the Labor Party.'

The hydrogen promise has proven to be a whole lot of hot air. It is not happening. We must reinvest in our traditional strengths as a country. We have huge energy resources. There is no reason we have to kill one industry to grow another industry. I've got nothing against developing our hydrogen resources. We don't really have hydrogen resources, but we could potentially make hydrogen. I don't have anything against trying to do that, but we do not need to walk away from a successful industry which is exporting record amounts of product and has been bringing in record revenues for this country in the last few years. We should back our coal industry and be proud of it, as it funds our nation. We should not go down garden paths which just give people false hope.