Mike Kelly (Eden-Monaro, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

We have an historic opportunity to use the Finkel report to finally engage in a serious bipartisan discussion on resolving our energy and climate change issues, and we genuinely call on the coalition to join us to get this underway. It is disappointing to see on the coalition side so many troglodytes resisting this. If only we could capture and store them far away from responsible policy development! We still have the member for Warringah throwing hand grenades from the sidelines in a last ditch effort to defend his 1950s bunker. In fact, the member admits he has not even read the report. That is a clear sign that he has reached a terrible new level of intellectual bankruptcy. I guess it takes a fossil to love fossil fuels. Everyone knows this is simply the national interest being held hostage to the leadership ambitions and bitterness of two men. Mr Turnbull, it is leadership we need now, and the nation and the world are watching and waiting to judge you as a leader.

There is no equivalency or balance between Labor and the coalition to be confected in reporting on this issue. Labor are rightly proud of being on the right side of history through our genuine and sensible policy processes, including green and white papers, widespread consultation, examination of international lessons learned, and careful evidence based design. Then there have been our attempts to achieve agreement. We took on the Shergold recommendation and John Howard's policy to go with an emissions trading scheme concept. We engaged and achieved agreement with Malcolm Turnbull 1.0 on such a scheme, only to see that go down at the coalition version of the Red Wedding. We then offered to move to an emissions intensity scheme, supported by a who's who of industry and experts, as well as the National Farmers' Federation and the New South Wales Young Nationals, which was government policy for only a nanosecond, as brave, brave Sir Malcolm bravely turned his tail and fled, yet again.

Now again we are ready to talk, but the question is: talk to whom and over what? After four years of doing absolutely nothing to address the issues of planning for the new grid and managing the NEM, we have reached a critical watershed. We know that there is a need for measures to address the stability of the market and the orderly transition to renewables. Business knows this, and so too does the Snowy Hydro team. What business needs is broader policy certainty, not stunts like the PM standing at the Snowy Hydro pumped storage project site like some uninvited photobomber. The entire project, from the bid for the feasibility funding from ARENA to the investment in the building phase, has had and will have nothing to do with the Turnbull government. In fact, the coalition tried to kill off ARENA and has not played any role in the fundraising process for construction. It is, in fact, projects like this which will deliver the storage and synchronicity we must have. The shame is that this and other projects would have been much further along if the coalition had not destroyed the policy framework of the Clean Energy Future package in 2013—an act of rank vandalism—thereby strangling the investment flow that was underway. The image of them celebrating on the floor of this chamber over that act will be forever frozen in history, along with Neville Chamberlain waving his piece of paper, as an image of delusional futility, negligence and betrayal.

The damning evidence is in the Finkel report: the need for a strategic plan to manage the orderly transition from coal, the management regime to prevent the gaming of the system caused by privatisation, and the evening out of generation across the NEM, eliminating the challenges of intermittency. Certainty will free up investment and make possible the deployment of technology that might in fact help thermal coal achieve a gentler glide path while eliminating harmful emissions. There are technologies out there that can do that. They profess a love of coal and have done nothing to assist the industry survive in a decarbonised investment world. We have had a doubling of energy prices, with greater slugs to come. There are the perverse attempts by the government to remove the energy supplement—it was called that for a reason—that supported the most vulnerable pensioners, including those on veterans pensions, in our community.

The whole country is watching the coalition right now and saying, 'Get real, get on with it, get talking to Labor.' If you fail yet again to take on this policy challenge, you and the members who irrationally buried their heads in the sand will rightly stand condemned by future generations for your disservice to them and the vital national interest. Eternal shame will be forever yours, preserved right here in Hansard and in the chaotic energy landscape that you bequeathed, with all its tragic consequences.

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