Tim Wilson (Goldstein, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

The member for Shortland, who spoke before me, is right: there are shades of 2009, when the Labor Party rolled their leader because they put forward the idea that climate change was the greatest moral challenge of their time and then they backed down from it, because they had a policy and then they did not have a policy. I had to reread the text of the matter of public importance today because it read like it was a matter that came from the government calling on the parliament to deliver policy certainty. Instead, we have a hypocritical argument from the opposition, because what is causing the greatest damage and the greatest sovereign risk in this country today for stable, consistent energy policy to deliver affordable electricity to Australian households and businesses is the Australian Labor Party. They are the people who constantly chop and change and want to increase regulations and restrictions which make it harder for anybody to invest with confidence. They are the ones who make it harder to invest with any confidence, because they are not led by reason, by markets, by evidence or by substance. They are led by the member for Melbourne and all of the other Greens friends that they have, who would rather lead the opposition on a path to economic ruin. They are the party who have always looked at prosperity by taxation, and that is what they are putting forward. The Prime Minister was 100 per cent right when he insightfully made the remark today that the policy of the Australian Labor Party has been to introduce a carbon tax and that they want the government to adopt their policy position. I can tell the Labor Party resolutely—right here, right now—that we will not be doing so.

What we are going to do is provide policy certainty by focusing on what we need to do to increase supply, and I want to congratulate the Prime Minister and the Minister for the Environment and Energy for their leadership in this space. What we have seen from the minister's comments and reflections today, and since he has been the minister, is that he is somebody who is focused on how to increase supply into the marketplace to put downward pressure on prices. What we have seen is national leadership by the Prime Minister in increasing storage into the marketplace to turn the failures from the opposition's policy in their time in government into something that will be sustainable into the future. That has been the fundamental problem. They have put more and more renewables into the market—and there is space for renewables. I am somebody who is resolutely technology neutral. I like a diversity so that we can manage the challenge ahead of us as a nation, but you cannot do it without the proper storage mechanisms to make this type of technology viable and to compete on a level playing field with other types of technology to put downward pressure on prices, because we know what we have seen as a consequence when we do not.

We have seen the human cost, not just the economic cost, of what has happened in the state of South Australia, and they ought to be ashamed of themselves for leading the nation down that path. The consequence is that people lose jobs, that there is a lack of investment and that there are lost opportunities for South Australians to build their future. Go and tell people locked in lifts overnight of the human consequences of the policies that you have implemented, and you will see the folly of what you are putting forward.

We also need to congratulate Alan Finkel, the Chief Scientist, on his review. The Chief Scientist has done an excellent job in providing a report that provides the foundations for stable and certain policy into the future. His recommendations, particularly in following the leadership of the Prime Minister around battery storage, are most welcome in building stability and predictability into the marketplace. It is one of the best reviews into energy policy we have seen for at least a decade, certainly eclipsing all the times that the opposition was in government, because it has focused on how to deliver affordable, stable, reliable power.

That does not mean there is no room for improvement and recommendations in addition to that, and I have made my own commentary in that space and will continue to do so, about making sure that we get a broader scale of energy into the marketplace. But it says we need some key things: new renewables that must provide a minimum level of storage; large generators, regardless of type, that will be required to give three years notice of closures; and a clean energy target in its current form, which we preferred over an EIS and will provide the necessary certainty for investment in new generation. It is a start. It is not the end of the conversation, but they will destroy that conversation with their high jinks and politics.

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