Bill Shorten (Maribyrnong, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Prime Minister. It has been reported that this year Queensland has experienced more than 23 times as many extreme power price spikes as South Australia and that New South Wales has had almost four times as many as South Australia. Given that New South Wales and Queensland are the states with the highest dependency on coal and the lowest levels of renewable energy in the nation, how does the Prime Minister explain these massive power spikes in Queensland and New South Wales when he cannot blame renewable energy?

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

There is a wonderful retro quality about the Leader of the Opposition's performance today. He reminds me of one of those old Soviet leaders who, as their country slipped further and further backwards, would be able to produce some figures from Gosplan showing that the VI Lenin memorial umbrella factory in Novosibirsk was beating production levels, and he would be able to produce all of those—

Mr Shorten interjecting—

And he holds up The Guardian. Well, there you go. We are not working together—seriously. I know it looks like he is performing on cue, but he is doing this by himself.

South Australia has the most expensive and the least reliable energy in Australia. It has the least resilient grid and the least reliable transmission, and it is the most dependent on another state—on the brown coal in Victoria, the most emissions intensive. All of that is fact. It is all set out by AEMO. It is all there in the report we were discussing yesterday. Business leaders from South Australia know that. The mums and dads who cannot get the air conditioning to work because there is no power know that. The people who cannot turn the lights on know that. The workers at Whyalla, at Arrium, whose jobs are at risk know that. They have had $30 million lost to that company, which is struggling to survive. One business owner after another through that state knows that fact. And what we see is the Labor Party in complete and utter denial.

Now, you would think that if they had one iota that was fair dinkum in them they would say, 'Boy, there's a lesson to be learned here. We better get with a better plan. We'd better build in some resilience. We need some more baseload. We need some more storage. We need some more transmission.' But, oh no—everything is perfect in the socialist paradise of South Australia, because they can come up with some numbers or a report from The Guardian to say so.

The facts are very clear: this is a serious business. If you want to have a lot of variable power in your grid, fine, but you have to plan for it. You have to have the backup; you have to have the firming power and you have to have the storage. Labor planned for none of that and South Australians are paying the price.

As for the member for Paterson—she talks about the Tomago aluminium smelter. Her party—your party, member for Paterson—wants to close down the coal-fired power stations in the Hunter that provide the baseload for Tomago. So go and ask the workers at Tomago how they think they will get on when they are not connected to Bayswater and Liddell.