Rowan Holzberger (Forde, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak against the motion. When the member for Wannon moved this motion originally, in the last sitting of parliament, I'm not sure that he was really watching the state of play of the Liberal Party leadership because, had he worked out that the member for Hume, the former minister for energy, was going to be the Leader of the Opposition today, he might not have wanted to talk about failures in energy affordability and also policy transparency. I think that he's been saved by a quirk of the standing orders that he at least had the opportunity to speak on it under the former leader, saving himself the discomfort of speaking to it under the current opposition leader, who I think more than anybody else is responsible for the failures in energy affordability and has practised policy opaqueness, to put it politely, more than any other practitioner in this parliament.

The motion here is an opportunity for me to talk about two of the things which I think are the most important things in the economy, and they are affordable housing and affordable energy. Indeed, I think it is the history of postwar Australia, the economic miracle that was postwar Australia, that governments, both Liberal and Labor, believed in cheap public housing and cheap public energy. It is really what drove Australia's economic success story, and Labor and Liberal both agreed to the point where I can say—this is a bit of a surprise to people—that one of my economic role models was in fact a Liberal premier, Thomas Playford, who was the Premier in South Australia from the forties to the seventies. Labor premiers and Liberal premiers and leaders around the country invested in public energy and they invested in public housing, not out of the goodness of their hearts but because they knew that providing cheap energy meant keeping the cost of living down, which took the pressure off wages, which helped business. It was the secret to Australia's success.

There's somebody else who I might quote to also shock people a little bit, and that is the former member for Dickson, Peter Dutton, who I think summed it up quite well when he said that energy is not just part of the economy; 'Energy is the economy.' And I can't attribute this to anybody, but I did hear it somewhere—it's certainly not my original thought, this one. But somebody said that the 19th century was very much about coal and steam, the 20th century was about oil and the internal combustion engine, and the 21st century is going to be about electric motors and renewable energy. At each point of those new energy sources, we have seen living standards rise dramatically—just as, with renewable energy and electric motors, we're going to see material abundance, material wealth, beyond our wildest imagination.

What we see today, though, is a divergence from that agreement around what was sensible, what was scientific and what worked. Whereas we agreed post war on economic and energy strategy, for some reason the coalition has gone off on a complete tangent and is now, on the other hand, supporting the most expensive forms of energy: coal and nuclear. I really am looking forward to the next election, which I believe is going to be about energy. It's going to be about renewable energy, firmed by gas and batteries—the cheapest form of energy—or it's going to be about the most expensive form of energy, which is coal and nuclear.

I can't work out why they have got this ideological obsession with the most expensive forms of energy. They have linked in their minds that renewable energy somehow means agreeing that climate change is human induced and they just cannot bring themselves to do that. Unfortunately, that failure to accept reality, that failure to work together on energy policy, just as Labor and Liberal governments did in postwar Australia, is going to cost Australians, just as the failure of the current opposition leader, when he was energy minister and during his 10 years of inaction, is responsible for people paying higher electricity prices today. Labor is fixing it. Labor is fixing it with the most sensible approach, and I just wish the opposition would join us rather than trying to score cheap points.

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