Darren Chester (Gippsland, National Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Roads and Regional Transport) Share this | Hansard source

It is no wonder that Labor MPs will never speak out against the Greens. The minister at the table will never speak out against the Greens in his new role as Minister for Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities. They will never speak out against the Greens because they cannot win their seats without them—44 Labor MPs in this place relying on preferences from the Greens to get them across the line. The Greens own the Labor Party, lock, stock and barrel.

Let us move out to some semiregional seats. In McEwen and Corangamite, the Greens’ vote is down to 11 per cent, and—surprise, surprise!—their preferences got the Labor candidate across the line again. Let us now move out to the true regional seats in Victoria. In the seat of Mallee, the Greens vote is just 7.8 per cent. In Gippsland, my own seat, they get 6.5 per cent of the vote and in Murray they get six per cent. Isn’t it funny that the further you move away from the city and the closer you get to the natural environment the fewer people believe the Greens and all their bulldust. There is a very good reason for that. It is that country people are practical people. They understand that to make an omelette you have to break an egg. They know that if you want to have a high-grade feature red gum dining table in your kitchen you need to use some timber from a tree. They know that if we want to feed our nation we have to balance the needs of the rivers and the soil with the crops we are growing and the animals we are feeding. That is the grand hypocrisy of the Greens and the people who vote for them. Go around to the houses of some of the Greens and their supporters and check what they are made from. Is it Australian timber or illegally grown Indonesian rainforest timber? Check in their fridges. No, they would not have fridges, would they, because of all that nasty pollution from burning coal? But, if they did have fridges, they would be full of fresh products from Australian farmers—probably those same horrible irrigators they want to shut down in the Murray-Darling irrigation district.

Then check their power supply—if they are they on the grid. Are they getting some of that cheap and reliable baseload energy from the Latrobe Valley in my electorate? I am sick to death of people in my community being vilified for working in power stations while the same people attacking them are running air conditioners on hot summer days and benefiting from the cheap and reliable energy we provide.

And while I am on the power industry I want to mention the Greens’ plan to shut down the Hazelwood power station. The Greens say they can shut it down and replace it with renewable energy. Give us all a break! Hazelwood generates about 1,600 megawatts of power each year. The average wind turbine can do 1.5 megawatts of installed capacity, so you would need to build 1,000 of them in Victoria just to replace Hazelwood. But—hang on a second—they only work for about 30 per cent of the time, so you would have to build three times as many wind turbines to achieve that same level of installed capacity. So we are talking about 3,000 wind turbines in Victoria to replace Hazelwood power station.

The Greens are conning Australians and it is about time that the Labor Party called their bluff. Our economy has been built on access to cheap, reliable baseload power—and I stress the word ‘baseload’. When we talk about energy security policies, we need to talk about the baseload power that powers our factories, hospitals, small businesses and households. They rely on it. Under the Greens’ and Labor’s plans for an electricity tax—let us call it what it is—power prices will go through the roof, small businesses will suffer and households will suffer, and it will not make a single bit of difference to the environment.

I know that the other side will not change their minds, because they owe everything to the Greens. They know they need the Greens’ preferences. But I have a bit of electoral advice for them—just for free—and the minister for the environment might want to listen to this very closely as well. Yesterday in the House, it was like The Sound of Music as the minister held hands with the member for Melbourne and danced through the fields in his tirade against the mountain cattlemen. You could almost hear the von Trapps singing in the background as he raced across the chamber in this embrace with the member for Melbourne in his opposition to the mountain cattlemen. It was beautiful to watch: the Greens and Labor, hand in hand, attacking a great and iconic tradition of Australian regional life.

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