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

I thank the member for Moreton, my great friend, for raising this motion which brings together the issues of the problem of getting acceptance of the science by some members of the coalition and the challenges and opportunities presented to rural and regional Australia. It's interesting, too, that we're doing this debate in the shadow of the comments by the member for Warringah, which were treated with the derision that they deserved. They were bizarre. We know that the member's had a varying array of positions on this issue over the years, but, within the one speech, he was breaking a new record: on the one hand denying climate change was happening but on the other hand saying, 'But it's going to be good for you.' He said, 'Fewer people die in the heat than they do in the cold.' We know that, with climate change, people expire not only in extreme heat but in extreme weather conditions. Of course this is leaving aside the huge numbers of people who are badly affected, health-wise, by the toxic emissions from fossil fuels. It's why many European countries, China and India are all committing to getting off fossil fuel powered vehicles by either 2025 or 2040 and why the UK is shutting down its coal-fired power. The proportion of coal-fired power it is now generating has dropped to a tiny percentage.

All I'm asking the coalition to do on this is read their own Finkel review. I've read all 212 pages of it. It's their report; he's their Chief Scientist. In the report, they highlighted the fact that households would save $90 a year on their electricity bills, or up to $1,000 over the decade to 2030, by implementing a clean energy target. The Finkel review said that there were things that had to be done at the six-month mark, the 12-month mark and the three-year mark. At the zero-month mark—that is, in last June—it said we needed an immediate decision on a clean energy target. That was because we needed to get the investment flowing on the capacity we need to prop up the system after four years of neglect. The plug was pulled on the investment flow that was happening prior to that.

The benefits of that investment flow land principally in regional Australia. This was another highlight in the Finkel review. The benefit of distributed energy resources offered a huge opportunity for rural and regional areas. We could save $16 billion on transmission costs. It also highlighted that there would be $400 of savings per year for rural and regional businesses and for domestic users of electricity—this is in the Finkel review. I'm not making this up. You wanted me to cite specifics; I'm citing them. Just read your own report.

The Finkel review highlighted the benefits from the point of view of costs for consumers, but we also know about the potential economic benefits. The real projection of jobs for Adani is vastly overshadowed by the potential jobs in renewable energy for rural and regional Australia. If you want to see specifics on that, I point you to the Climate Institute's study on the potential job and economic benefits for rural and regional Australia of investment in renewable energy in particular. They said it would create something like 34,000 new jobs by 2030. But there are also the benefits to our farmers. The Carbon Farming Initiative—which was part of our other policy back in 2013—was going to provide enormous benefits to farmers from activities like getting brokerage on reforestation or partial reforestation of their properties, which they could have traded in, and we were setting up a regime to approve methodologies on other opportunities in boosting farm economy.

We also know from the recent ANU study that there are up to 22,000 sites suitable for pumped hydro across rural and regional Australia. There are at least 8,600 sites in New South Wales and 1,770 sites in Queensland. These sites would provide, overwhelmingly, what we need to back up our renewable energy transition. We also hear the coalition talk about Snowy Hydro 2.0. I'll keep telling the community and the public that the coalition had nothing to do with this project. The Snowy Hydro team, under the leadership of Paul Broad, made the submission for the feasibility money in February this year, months before Malcolm Turnbull discovered it and came along and photobombed it. That money came from ARENA, a body that the coalition tried to destroy. The government provided no money for the feasibility study, which was an independent process under ARENA, and the financing for the construction—Snowy Hydro tell me—will be raised by them. It will not be provided by the government, because the business case will stand up. This project has been on the books for 30 years of development. It would have been further advanced by now if we had kept the policy framework that propped up that investment.

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