Mary Aldred (Monash, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Reliable, affordable, sustainable—that is what we should be driving at when developing Australia's national energy policy. We absolutely need to have an emissions reduction plan, and, in fact, the coalition has got a strong history of preparing that since the Shergold review during the Howard coalition government. But it can't be at any cost or at a timeline that's unrealistic and puts households and industry at a significant disadvantage. Labor and the teals would have you believe that the energy transition Australia is confronting is simple, cheap and easy. It's not. It's actually complex, complicated and at a cost. That's what we've got to work our way through in a sensible, pragmatic manner. We need to make sure that we've got all technology available and on the table. That includes carbon capture and storage, nuclear and other options.

Australia at the moment is an outlier to the rest of the world: Canada, the United States, Japan, China, India, the eurozone and New Zealand. Chris Bowen seems to know something that the rest of the world doesn't, and that is because they are confronting those three key challenges of reliability, affordability and sustainability. I fear the teals are making a lot of this worse in spooking state governments. We've seen it in New South Wales, where Penny Sharpe, the energy minister there, is effectively using government funding to get Origin to keep its Eraring power station open for longer than its natural life. We've also seen it in Victoria, where our once-four, now-three coal-fired power stations—looking at Yallourn, for example, owned by EnergyAustralia—are still providing 22 per cent of Victoria's baseload electricity. Yallourn is set to close in the next three years. All of those coal-fired power stations will come to the end of their natural engineering life at some point, but the Victorian government have been able to come up with a clear, sensible way forward to replace, effectively, 22 per cent of our baseload electricity within those next three years.

I also have real concerns that the burden for most of this transition is being put on regional Australia. We all want to pay our fair share. We all want to contribute our fair share of responsibility. Right now I'm speaking with farmers across my electorate, from South Gippsland and Bass Coast to West Gippsland, where we have the best soil of anywhere in Australia. We are proud to grow, make and manufacture things. About 23 per cent of the nation's dairy output comes from the Gippsland region, and about 26 per cent of Victoria's beef production comes from the Gippsland region. We are proud to provide that produce but we are unfairly being asked to shoulder all of that burden. For example, there are a number of offshore wind proposals off the coast that would have transmission lines going through some of that prime agricultural farmland to Darnum in West Gippsland. We grow great horticultural produce and dairy produce there. They are looking down the barrel of a huge battery energy storage project that those neighbouring farms don't want. Victorian Energy Minister Lily D'Ambrosio is riding roughshod over those local communities.

I want to commend the effort of my state parliamentary colleague, the member for Narracan, Wayne Farnham, who has stood shoulder to shoulder with that farming community. We've met with the local residents. We've heard the concerns, and I am imploring the Victorian state government to take those concerns seriously and to listen to our regional communities. We cannot shoulder all of that burden.

The cost of energy is going up. This government promised a $275 cut to Australians' energy bills no less than 97 times; we're yet to see it. Energy is one of the drivers of inflation in this country, and we've just seen inflation go up to 3.2 per cent, which is outside the RBA recommended band of two to three per cent. You only need to look at Philip Lowe, the former RBA governor, and his remarks about inflation being a 'homegrown problem'. We're dealing with government overspend, but we also need to look at other areas like energy that are having a direct impact on inflation. Households and families in my electorate are bearing that burden.

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