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

On average—not for a few minutes but on average. That's how the monthly figures work: on average.

This is a plan designed by Australian experts and backed by Australian experts—the CSIRO, AEMO, the Australian Energy Market Commission and the Australian Energy Regulator—all of whom have told the government repeatedly that renewables are the cheapest form of energy and that the biggest threat to reliability in the system is coal-fired power.

There is an alternative approach. On Saturday we saw the National Party announce that they are scrapping net zero. It'll be just a little while before the Liberal Party follows. The Leader of the National Party had justification. He called on expert reports. He said Net Zero Australia has said it will be somewhere between $7 trillion and $9 trillion, and Rainforest Reserves have already made it clear that going to an all-renewables approach would be $1.382 trillion. So he's quoting Net Zero Australia and Rainforest Reserves.

Let's have a look at the Leader of the National Party's experts. Net Zero Australia issued a statement today. It says:

Different individuals and groups have been misrepresenting key cost estimates from the NZAu Australia Project as 'the cost of Australia reaching net zero'. These misrepresented costs have typically ranged from $1.5 trillion to $9 trillion.

Does that sound familiar? I wonder who they were talking about misrepresenting them! Then we've got Rainforest Reserves. They've been quoting a lot of people. Rainforest Reserves quoted the Journal of Cleaner Production, who support their cases. The publishers of that journal were asked about the references, and they said:

These references appear to be hallucinated and do not exist—we have not found any articles with those titles published in Elsevier journals.

'Hallucinations' is a common theme. We've got the National Party and the Liberal Party following each other to net zero. It'll only be a few minutes before it's announced that the Liberal Party's followed them. The party of Menzies has become the party of Sky News frenzies.

See this speech in context