Damian Drum (Nicholls, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

This is an amazing debate in Australia today where the two extremes of this debate seem to want to hijack the normal common debate around where we take our power source into the future. All Australians want to have a greener future. We all want to have a cleaner atmosphere. We want to have less emissions, but we need to do it in a way that does not leave our fellow Australians behind. We need to talk about the transition period. We need to talk about a way to transition sources. We need to have a genuine, open and honest conversation about the use of gas as we start to walk away from coal. We need to be able to talk to coal workers and say, 'Your job is secure for the next 20 years, but you might not have a job for your children in the coal industry.' We need to find the middle ground in this debate. We need to talk about how we are going to transition our economy without leaving our people behind.

We also need to talk honestly about where Australia sits at the moment in relation to rooftop solar. We never hear the doomsayers from the other side or from the ABC say that Australia is leading the world when it comes to rooftop solar. On a pro rata basis, we are on top of the world, the best country in the world, and we're so far on top that if you add the second and third countries together they still don't get to where we are. But we never hear this. We never hear about the incredible success that Australia is having with rooftop solar.

If you want to throw in wind energy as well, we are still the top country in the world pro rata when it comes to wind and solar. Yet we never hear this. The other side keeps bellowing out the fact that we're not enough. Go back to a couple of years ago, and the only criticism they had of us was that we were going to use clever accounting to meet our Paris commitments. Well, now we're not. Now we're 20 per cent below. We are chasing 26 to 28 per cent on 2005 levels and we're sitting at 20.1. It looks like we're going to get there in a canter. But now they're saying that's not enough. The commentary keeps changing to make sure that somehow or other we can keep talking Australia down. It is just the most ridiculous concept.

To think that we're going to be lectured to by all these European countries who use nuclear as a 20 per cent base for all of their energy needs. Give me a break. If we had 20 per cent nuclear, we could step right out of coal. We could have anything we want. But of course we need this balance in our power source because we don't have nuclear. We need this dispatchable power so we can turn the lights on, run our manufacturing industries and run all of our businesses when we need to run them. Obviously, we have a very delicate mix at the moment, and AEMO will tell you all that it's very dicey. Several times a month we nearly go into that blackout stage, and it's only because we have too much intermittent energy in the mix and we need to be careful about the balance.

This is not about being luddites that just refuse to move with the times. We simply need dispatchable power in our grid, in our system, and we need to be able to transition across to these intermittent renewable energy sources. We need to transition across in a careful, considered and measured way and not leave our businesses and our people behind. This is a real risk that we don't talk about often enough.

Australia has done so much better than so many countries in recent times. Our targets toward 2030 are going better than Germany, France, Canada, New Zealand and Japan. Between 2005 and 2019, our emissions fell faster than those of Canada, Japan, the United States and New Zealand, and yet these countries somehow or other want to lecture us about not doing enough. It simply doesn't make any sense. And there's the conversation around batteries. Batteries will be the answer, batteries are going to have a significant role in the way we can deliver dispatchable power, but the technology isn't there yet. So let's get behind the battery sources and let's invest in them. Let's invest in hydrogen, which the government is doing in a balanced and measured way. This is something we don't need to be locking horns on. We are roughly all on the same page, except that we have an opposition that just wants to try and pick holes wherever it can. (Time expired)

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