Garth Hamilton (Groom, Liberal National Party) Share this | Hansard source

The Minister for Climate Change and Energy has failed at every metric that matters under his portfolio. He promised the Australian people cheaper power and delivered a 40 per cent increase in power costs in just a single year. He promised emissions reductions, but emissions are flatlining. He promised 82 per cent renewables and is on track to miss that by a mile. He has legislated for a 43 per cent reduction in emissions, which he'll miss by a thousand miles. He promised reliable supply and instead is delivering blackouts, grid instability and human suffering. He promised secure gas supply and delivered shortages. He promised a $122 billion transition, but we are staring down the barrel of at least a more than $500 billion bill that we cannot pay for.

Energy is the economy. Every successful modern economy is built on abundant, reliable and cheap power. When energy is cheap, businesses expand, wages rise, and industries cluster. When energy is expensive, everything else becomes harder as manufacturing leaves, household budgets tighten and governments scramble to paper over the damage with subsidies. Australia lost sight of this when we signed up for net zero. In doing so, we didn't just set an emissions target; we committed to rebuilding the entire economy around emissions reduction as the primary organising principle. That decision came with enormous costs, profound trade-offs and long-term consequences that were never honestly or fully explained to the public at the time.

The most obvious casualty of this has been industrial capacity. Manufacturing is energy intensive by definition. Aluminium, steel, cement, fertiliser, chemicals and food processing all demand large volumes of cheap and firm power. As energy prices rise and reliability falls, those industries don't adapt; they leave. They go to greener pastures, places where energy is cheaper, and once they're gone they do not come back easily. This matters far more than just jobs or GDP. In the current geostrategic environment, industrial capacity is a first-order national security consideration. The ability to produce, repair and scale physical goods is a deterrent in itself, as there is no military industrial complex without an industrial complex. Nations that hollow out their industrial base in pursuit of ideological goals, a path the minister has chosen to lead Australia down, those nations become strategically brittle.

Cheap energy is also the best wages policy there is. Energy is a core input to almost every product and service. When power prices rise, businesses face higher costs long before workers see higher pay packets. Those costs are passed on through prices, squeezing real wages and living standards. No amount of industrial relations reform can offset an energy system that structurally drives up production costs, yet, instead of confronting this reality, we have layered ideology on top of dysfunction. Nowhere is this clearer than the federal government's approach to firming generation.

Take the Kurri Kurri gas power plant as an example. This was conceived as a reliability backstop for New South Wales—a sensible objective—but it has been burdened with a mandate that defies engineering, economics and common sense: a requirement to operate on 30 per cent hydrogen by 2030. Hydrogen at that scale is not commercially viable, nor is it even foreseeably available by that date. Every engineer knows this. This is not a revelation I'm laying out before you; this is the common, accepted view of engineers around Australia. Hydrogen at that scale is not commercially viable nor will it be available by that date. Hydrogen is expensive to produce and transport, difficult to store and inefficient to burn. Retrofitting the Kurri Kurri station to meet this target will require at least $700 million in capital works alone. The minister has acknowledged that, but that figure doesn't include the far larger cost: the taxpayer subsidies needed to produce the hydrogen in the first place and to underwrite its supply indefinitely. The private sector has already walked away from large-scale green hydrogen en masse because it cannot be made at a competitive cost.

I'm an engineer. I love technology. I have no doubt that there are wonderful, brilliant minds—Australian minds—working towards new technologies, and so they should. They should be encouraged by government to do so. This is one of the things that has dragged us forward. I remember my first car—an XD Falcon. It used to run at about 17 litres to the 100 kilometres. I thought that was OK. I was a student. I didn't have any other options. My Prado now weighs twice as much and runs at about seven litres. Technology will take us forward. It will reduce emissions by reducing the amount of fuel required to do the same amount of work. This is happening, and it's a wonderful thing. Engineers around Australia play their part in that, and they should be very proud of doing so.

When we rush through this and when make decisions on timetables that are not in alignment with where industry is, we leave taxpayers holding the bag—not just once but permanently. This is not transition policy; it's a subsidy treadmill designed to satisfy a target rather than deliver affordable and reliable power to Australians. This is what happens when energy policy is driven by symbolism, as it has been under this minister. Instead of outcomes, we end up paying more for less reliability. We get weaker industry and lower real wages. But we do get one thing, and it's something that this minister prides himself on: ambition. We saw that in the minister's ambition to be the president of the next COP meeting. It's a fine thing, no doubt—a great thing to have on one's resume.

While that is happening, we are seeing energy prices go through the roof. As I stated earlier, we saw a 40 per cent increase in energy costs in just one year. We need a course correction. We must rebuild our economy around industry and not around emissions accounting, and that means restoring cheap and reliable energy as the foundation of national prosperity and strategic strength. Energy policy should not be an excuse to weaken ourselves economically or burden future generations with unnecessary costs. There's a lot of work to be done in taking care of our environment and in making sure that Australia has the cheap and reliable energy that it needs. We are out of balance at the moment. The approach we are taking right now, today, is out of balance, and we must correct it.

Sitting suspended from 13:30 to 16:01

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