Chris Bowen (McMahon, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Climate Change and Energy) Share this | Hansard source

I'll take the opportunity to briefly respond to the member for Fairfax and questions he raised earlier. He asked me a series of questions—I think 10 or 15, or something like that, which is a whole lot more questions than he has asked me in the main chamber this year, which is two so far.

The shadow minister asked me about a number of matters. He asked me about, in effect, investment and capacity in the system. It is rather extraordinary and ironic that the shadow minister would ask me what we're doing to encourage investment, when he and the opposition have opposed every single measure we have embarked upon to encourage investment—most particularly, the Climate Change Act, which renewable energy investors around the world have told me is absolutely vital to their investment decisions. I had the chief executive of a very large, international, renewable investor—in fact, arguably the largest in the world—tell me recently that Australia is now, in his mind, the key market in the world for investment. I asked him what had changed to bring that about, and he said that it was our Climate Change Act. Honourable members opposite opposed that. It is the single biggest thing we have done to send the message to investors in the world that Australia has changed, the government has changed, the parliament has changed and the country has changed. The opposition hasn't changed, but we can't help that. But the transition is occurring without them.

Also, there's our capacity investment mechanism, which the previous government talked about for years and could never deliver. We delivered that last year, in a unanimous agreement with the states and territories. I'm looking forward to making further announcements about that in coming weeks, in terms of the rollout of the capacity investment mechanism in New South Wales, followed by South Australia and Victoria. It's absolutely vital for encouraging investment in dispatchable renewable energy in Australia. Luckily, the shadow minister and the opposition don't have the opportunity to oppose that, because it doesn't require legislation. I'm sure they would if they could, but we're getting on with it and we don't need legislation.

Similarly, there's Rewiring the Nation, which the opposition opposes. When you look at every single chief executive—

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