Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

I do thank the honourable member for his question because in asking it he puts his finger on the very central problem that Labor faces with this issue: that they treat renewable energy as an ideological issue rather than a technological issue. The bottom line is simply this: that there are many sources of electricity. There is intermittent renewable. There is hydro. We have many forms of fossil fuel generation. All of them have different characteristics.

What we have to do is take away the ideology and the political claptrap with which the Labor Party surrounds all of their policies and focus on these objectives. What we need to do is ensure that we keep the lights on—something the honourable member's Labor colleagues in South Australia demonstrably failed to do. We have to keep the lights on. We have to ensure that there is energy security. We have to ensure that households and businesses can afford to pay for it—and his Labor colleagues in South Australia have created the most expensive wholesale electricity in Australia. That is very helpful, isn't it, I ask the honourable member—terribly helpful if you want to revive your manufacturing base. Come to South Australia and pay more for your electricity than anywhere else! What an extraordinary proposition.

So you have got to do have energy security and energy affordability, and we have to meet our emission reduction targets as set out in the Paris treaty. So we have to do all three and we have to make sure we achieve them all together. The minister who has just answered the last question set out the importance of doing that and the way he is showing the leadership that the Labor Party in government constantly failed to do and fails to do at the state level in ensuring that we get the measures, the plans that give us security, affordability and emission reduction.

This is a time when we must stop putting ideology into something that is essentially an engineering issue. How do we achieve those three goals? There is a way to do it. We are leading the way.

Mr Perrett interjecting—

Ms Rishworth interjecting—

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