Kevin Hogan (Page, National Party, Deputy Manager of Opposition Business in the House) Share this | Hansard source

I know you're aware, I know everyone on this side of the House is aware and I know that the Australian community is aware that the cost of living is a crisis in this country. It's a crisis for family budgets and it's a crisis for small business in Australia that the cost of everything is just going up and up and up.

I want to focus on a couple of things through this next 10 minutes. One is obviously the focus of this—energy. I want to talk about the failures of this government on energy policy and also want to note, too, that just this week we saw mortgage rates go up for Australian families. Interest rates around the world are going down in most countries. They're coming down in just about every country around the world except Australia. It's commented on by most economists around Australia and the Reserve Bank themselves that a lot of this is about government policy right now. Every mortgage went up in Australia this week because of the policies of this Labor government. The damage that's going to do to family budgets and, indeed, in higher interest rates to business is not good.

You can't go past the cost of living and you can't go past talking about this government without first talking about the Minister for Energy and Climate Change. They have an ideological obsession that, at the expense of $9 trillion, they should get Australia to net zero by 2050. I'm going to go to some of the costs of that and why that is so destructive, but, before I do, in regional Australia, I'm very conscious that that involves 60 million solar panels to be physically built in predominantly regional Australia and 20,000 wind turbines as well. The minister likes to get up and say that renewable energy is cheap or free. It's not, and he's very misleading in saying that. One of the major costs behind it is the new transmission system—20,000 kilometres of a new transmission system. Why do they need a new transmission system? Because all this generation capacity they're building with these 60 million solar panels and these 20,000 wind turbines—they're being built where there aren't any transmission systems, and they're being built where there aren't poles and wires. The cost of that is enormous. About 50 per cent of the bill is because of some of those delivery costs, but he says it's free. He's misleading. He knows that, and he continues to mislead the Australian public on that.

What we're already seeing—we can talk about families and we can talk about the fact that they get their energy bill every quarter and are shocked and horrified by how much it's going up. The other thing that's going on around Australia is that businesses are feeling it, especially big business and heavy business—businesses that are energy intensive, like the smelters around Australia or the refineries around Australia. You could go up and down the coast of Western Australia with the nickel industry and the lead industry. You go to South Australia and see the steelworks or the lead industry in Port Pirie. You can go around the east coast of Australia and see ones like Tomago, a more recent one. All of them have either paused what they do or have asked or said that they need government assistance. What does that say? That says that something is going seriously wrong, if those businesses are unanimously saying that they need government assistance to keep going, and it all comes back to this government's and this minister's obsession with emissions reduction.

We acknowledge that we should do our fair share of emissions reduction, but their obsession has us leading the world in emissions reduction. I want to highlight three countries that are not signed up to the policies of this Labor government. Three countries are saying, 'We're not going to do what Australia is going to do with emissions reduction,' and those three countries are China, India and the United States. All of those countries have said, 'We are not signed up to that.' They're not signed up to it, because they know the expense of it and they know the unattainability of it.

Let's take China as one example. The emissions in China go up more every year than Australia's total emissions. I'll repeat that, because it's important to understand that: the emissions in China go up more every year than Australia's total emissions. This minister and this government are obsessed with emissions. We want to do our fair share, but nothing we do in Australia will change the temperature of the globe, because we only produce just over one per cent of total emissions. Yes, we should be committed to doing our fair share. Yes, we could contribute as a good global citizen. But nothing we do, given the size of our economy and amount of our emissions, compared to any other country, will change anything. But that doesn't fit with the ideological obsession of this minister and this government. While they might feel good, this is not good.

We on this side of the House, as the opposition, do have a plan, and a responsible plan. What we've said we will do is lower emissions by the average of the OECD. Whatever they lower emissions by, we will match that—not what they say they're going to do but what they actually do. That is the target that we have committed to. That will mean a difference. This government's obsession means that those opposite are aiming for emissions reduction in 2035 of between 60 and 70 per cent. It makes them feel good, but, as I've said, the damage that's doing to families and businesses is manifest. By our target, we'd be getting our emissions reduction to around 35 per cent, which is doing our fair share but not killing the Australian economy and family budgets at the same time.

I've mentioned cost-of-living pressures. We know mortgage increases in Australia have gone up this week because of the policies of this government, but I want to just touch on a couple of other things that are doing a lot of damage to cost of living. One is very dear to a lot of colleagues of mine, especially colleagues who operate within the Murray-Darling Basin. The Murray-Darling Basin in one of the great food bowls of the world, not just Australia. The food and fibre growing in the Murray-Darling basin is quite phenomenal. Those opposite have a different ideological obsession on this one.

Their ideological obsession on the Murray-Darling Basin, for some reason, is that the Murray River mouth can never close. The bizarreness of that is that before we had the lock-and-weir system built on the Murray and the Darling, the mouth of the Murray closed a lot. What those locks and weirs do is hold back water so there is a continual amount of water that goes out. In droughts, that would lock up all the time. With that ideological obsession, what they're doing now—talk about a waste of money—is spending billions of dollars buying water off food and fibre producers in this country. I don't think it's hard to work out that if you stop farmers and producers in the Murray-Darling Basin from growing things, that isn't going to help the cost of those things. The Minister for Climate Change and Energy wants to talk about supply and demand. I'll tell you what: if you're growing less of something, the price of it might go up. Their obsession there is not okay.

The other thing I want to talk about on their obsession with emissions reduction is that they have already instituted a ute and SUV tax. That means the cost of SUVs and the cost of utes in this country have already gone up, and not because of anything but government policy on this side. When the tradie wants to go and buy his ute or when the family want to go and buy their SUV, they have all gone up distinctly because of a blatant government policy.

The other thing I also want to talk about—and it's endemic—is the changes we saw made to the EPBC Act on the last day of parliament last year. One thing this Labor government has in its DNA—especially when it has an alliance with the Greens, as it does in the Senate—is it cannot have too much red and green tape. It loves red and green tape. It loves more legislation telling people what they can do and what they can't do.

Every stakeholder I talk to that is trying to export out of this country, that is trying to do stuff in this country, says that the government are making things more difficult, and therefore more expensive, in the government legislation they've done over the last four years. You don't see all this immediately; sometimes, with these legislative changes—and especially the ones made to the EPBC Act—we might not see them for three or four years. But this government don't understand the economy. They are sending companies and families broke in this country. Shame on them!

See this speech in context