Katie Allen (Higgins, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Offshore Electricity Infrastructure Bill 2021 and related bills. If one thing was made clear yesterday by our announcement, it's that the Morrison government fully supports renewable energy production as well as regional jobs and jobs for Australians. The bills before us today allow for those things to flourish, by establishing a regulatory framework on offshore electricity infrastructure. Our great country has numerous important renewable energy infrastructure projects on the horizon, and, for their success to be guaranteed, this framework must be employed. Projects including the Marinus Link, Star of the South and Sun Cable will be enabled by this legislation, ensuring all Australians have access to affordable and reliable power sources.

The Offshore Electricity Infrastructure Bill 2021 is crucial to ensuring Australians have a strong regulatory framework, around which a successful renewable energy sector can continue to be developed. Importantly, this bill will protect existing maritime stakeholders, by ensuring that areas will be made unavailable for infrastructure projects if their impacts cannot be appropriately controlled. This bill guarantees the protection of our environment, by placing an onus on developers to be conscious of their wider impact as they plan and proceed with their works. Moreover, this bill requires developers to provide financial security covering the decommissioning of their projects prior to any construction occurring. This ensures that taxpayers' funds won't be wasted by the government on decommissioning these infrastructure projects.

This legislation stands to reaffirm the Morrison government's vision for a renewable future, by accelerating the development of crucial infrastructure at the same time as protecting existing maritime entities. This bill not only prohibits unauthorised offshore electricity infrastructure in Commonwealth waters; it ensures that existing maritime businesses, including navigation and fishing, are protected from interference by developmental impacts. The offshore infrastructure regulator will be authorised to take action against such businesses whose developmental actions adversely affect other businesses. This is a key commitment, as it acknowledges and holds to account large businesses by carefully regulating the way in which they proceed with infrastructure development. Moreover, this bill stands to empower the minister to declare areas as suitable for electricity infrastructure as well as grant licenses to businesses to proceed with development. This ensures a strong system of regulation that protects existing industry while encouraging renewable energy production offshore.

This speaks to a number of projects that are in development and on the horizon. I'd like to talk about three of those now. Firstly, I'd like to talk about the Marinus Link. Returning to this bill's framework, it comprehensively covers all aspects of energy generation and transmission, supporting our commitment to affordable and reliable power. The Marinus Link will be regulated under this legislation. It connects Tasmania and Victoria with a 1,500-megawatt capacity undersea electrical and telecommunications pathway. This project will link the two states as well as strengthen Australia's electricity grid. Many don't know that Tasmania's high level of hydropower makes it already a net energy producer. By linking with Victoria, this will enable Tasmania to become the battery of the nation. In addition to this, excess renewable energy produced in Victoria will be able to be transferred to pumped hydroelectric storage facilities in Tasmania for future use, increasing the efficiency of Australia's energy sector.

The national significance of the Marinus Link cannot be understated. It crucially supports the energy market as it transitions to being more renewable. That's not to mention the estimated $1.5 billion of revenue added to the Victorian economy and the 1,400 jobs created. With the strong regulatory framework this bill provides, the Marinus Link will be accelerated to support Australian industry and, in particular, Tasmania's ability to become the battery of the nation.

The second project that will be supported by this legislation is the Sun Cable project, particularly the Australia-Asia Powerlink. Under this proposal, the world's largest solar farm and battery storage facility will be installed in the Northern Territory, with energy transmitted to Singapore via a high-voltage direct current transmission network. These are amazing projects. This is the future for Australia. This project is an important one for the green energy evolution, and it will work towards helping to decarbonise the energy sector. Not only considering the environmental benefits, the Australia-Asia PowerLink will create thousands of operation and construction jobs, especially stimulating local regional communities and suppliers with the $23 billion project. Again, the legislation before us today enables projects like this, empowering industry and ensuring a commitment to a renewable energy-led future.

The third project is the Star of the South off the coast of Victoria, which will be enabled by this legislation. Currently Victoria generates enough electricity through wind energy to meet roughly nine per cent of the nation's total electricity demand. The Star of the South project, yet again enabled by the bill before us today, will see this figure rise to 20 per cent. This endeavour can power 1.2 million households across Victoria by connecting into the grid through the National Energy Market, strategically making use of existing infrastructure to promote efficiency and ensuring energy prices are kept low for all Australians. The star of the sea will invest and unlock $8.7 billion of funding into the region and $1.4 billion into the Latrobe Valley in particular. These projects are not only important as standalone projects but need to be considered as part of Australia's national effort towards moving toa renewable future, and that is what I would like to talk about today.

As I said in my first speech, climate change is real and affects us all. I stressed at that time both the environmental and economic imperative to act then, and I stress it again today. It's not just an environmental imperative to act, it's an economic imperative. In fact, it's not just an economic imperative, we now know it's an economic inevitability. And yesterday was a momentous point in our country's history. Yesterday, Australia committed to net zero emissions by 2050. This target is important, because it puts out there where we are heading, and we have said very clearly what our principles are for the plan that underpin it. We don't believe in a target without a plan; we believe in a plan that supports a target. And there has been months and months and years and years of work to this point to be able to say what those factors are that will contribute to our future.

As a medical researcher, I understand the principles of innovation. I understand that to unleash innovation you need to develop commercial, scalable solutions, and that's why the Morrison government is taking a partnership approach with business. It's not a top-down bureaucratic approach. Our approach has the market principles at heart. It's about providing choice—choice for consumers, partnerships with businesses, building jobs for the future, allowing the market to take us there but by investing in the market in order to unleash our technological capabilities. This is not a bureaucratic approach which suffocates innovation. We will see a range of new and innovative technologies reach cost competitiveness and help drive down costs across industries while building strong Australian businesses. That is the Liberal way. That is the way that has been effective and efficient over and over again. Our scientists and our engineers will be front and centre of this new green tech evolution.

There's a lot of talk about what this plan will be, and obviously the plan has only been released in the last day so there's a lot more talk to come, but, more importantly, there's a lot more delivery to come and we need to look at the details of that delivery as we move forward. We know that that is coming, but, before we get to that point, I want to talk about the generalities, because the government has put very clearly on its road map what it intends to do. Firstly, continuing our strong record of emissions reduction with our emissions being 20 per cent lower than on 2005 levels. Secondly, our Technology Investment Roadmap will use technology targets to reduce emissions by a further 40 per cent. We also understand that there are global technology trends with shifts in our demand for exports and developments in global technology, and this will reduce emissions by a further 15 per cent. As an example, lithium, nickel and copper are likely to be the critical minerals of the future. We know that. For instance, I understand that at the moment our lithium exports are at around 90,000 tonnes a year—90,000 tonnes in 2021. Each electric vehicle needs about nine kilograms of lithium. It also needs about 40 kilograms of nickel. So that's a lot of kilograms of critical minerals that the world will need as we increase our electric vehicle capacity, and we know that that is coming at speed.

We have 90,000 tonnes being shipped out this year to our export markets, at $14,000 a tonne—I think that's about right. I spoke to someone who works in the lithium sector, and he said that they're anticipating that the lithium export market will grow from 90,000 tonnes a year to two million tonnes by 2030. You can see right there that that is one of the future exports that we will see our country develop and grow. I encourage that we look to doing better with refining our critical minerals and making sure we do more value-add so that we can extract the highest amount of value before we export them overseas. All of these new global technology trends, which include use of electric vehicles and hydrogen trucks, need critical minerals, and our government has had that very firmly in our focus.

We also believe that high-integrity offsets will be important for our future. These involve restoring carbon in soils and vegetation and working with our Indo-Pacific neighbours to reduce emissions by a further 10 per cent. Everyone knows there's millions and millions of hectares in Australia that we can better utilise through farming methods and through storing carbon in our soils and vegetation. That will enable us to provide high-integrity offsets not just for ourselves but for our neighbours.

We also know that future technology breakthroughs will be incredibly important. We understand that investing in future new and emerging technologies will also be important for the last 15 per cent of emissions reductions. These are not just made-up ideas; these are numbers that are backed by scientific integrity and scientific investment. We will continue to do that as we work and partner with business to make sure that the R&D that's developed here in Australia and around the world gets to commercialisable, scalable outcomes that will fuel our super power outcomes for Australia.

In the past, I've talked a lot in this place about our low-emissions technology strategy, and that's because I've believed in these technologies from the very start. I've really backed them in, and it's pleasing to hear that they are being talked about by the media more frequently now. Joe Biden has supported the five low-emissions technology stretch targets and added a sixth one. Those five stretch targets in our plan have now been increased to six stretch targets, as Joe Biden, the President of the United States, did earlier this year—except that our sixth stretch target is different from his. Our stretch targets include clean hydrogen under $2 a kilogram; ultralow-cost solar under $15 per megawatt hour; energy storage—that is, batteries—under $100 per megawatt hour; and low-emissions steel and aluminium steel production under $700 per tonne and aluminium under $2,200 per tonne. I note that the Minister for Industry, Energy and Emissions Reduction, Angus Taylor, has said that he believes a stretch target on green cement will also be very important, and I back that statement in. The remaining targets are carbon capture and storage under $20 per tonne of CO2; and soil carbon measurement under $3 per hectare per year. These are incredibly important aspects of understanding the commercialisable aspects of getting to a clean-tech future.

This morning I was out at a hydrogen pilot program in the ACT, which is being funded by Woodside. It's a partnership program. The federal government is investing billions of dollars—I think $1.2 billion—in hydrogen development, and it's also partnering with states and territories, which is a very good outcome. At this Woodside pilot program, I saw, for the first time, electrolysers in use. They are using green energy from the ACT grid to electrolyse water, produce hydrogen, compress the hydrogen and then take it to a pump. It's all there on site at this hydrogen hub. We actually put hydrogen into a hydrogen car, which we then drove around the corner. It's fantastic to see. It's like an electric vehicle but, instead of being plugged into a power point, it's plugged into a hydrogen pump. The hydrogen is very cold; you have to take the temperature right down. Instead of putting petrol into your bowser, you are putting hydrogen into the bowser. This is the future as we speak, and it is now coming at speed. As we know, when you start to commercialise things, the costs come down. We know that, as we move into the future, more and more of these projects will become our reality.

So we have a plan. It's about technology, not taxes. It's about partnering with business. I'm very pleased to say that the bill that we're discussing today is a very important one to underpin this progress, and I commend the bill to the House.

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