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

There are a couple of things in the member for Cowper's contribution that I would like to respond to. He says that maybe it's not good enough for our strategic fuel supplies to be offshore. I'll say where it's not good enough for them to be. That's Texas or Louisiana. I think that the fact that the person who's now the opposition leader, and was the former energy minister, was the person responsible for that says a lot about where this opposition is going and where they would want to take this country.

The second thing he said is that it's up to the energy minister to guarantee to agricultural business—and I guess to other businesses—that there will be fuel supply. The energy minister has been very clear that this is not a supply problem, that all of the fuel that was supposed to arrive in Australia has arrived and that all of the fuel that we expect to arrive in Australia is going to arrive. I think that the opposition should really be much more responsible in the language they're using. Ultimately there are demand pressures here, which is creating disruption, but there is enough diesel and there is enough petrol in this country. As much as we had expected there to be, there is. So there is no problem with supply. Actually the opposition would be helpful, in the national interest, if they were to help get that message out.

So I guess I'm aggrieved, in my first grievance speech, about what the member for Cowper has had to say, which incidentally is the sort of thing that I did want to talk about here. In what is my first grievance speech, there are many things which I am aggrieved about—many things which people in the communities that we represent are aggrieved about. That is because we have been left as a government with 10 years of inaction by the previous government in so many areas that it's really hard to choose one topic to be aggrieved about. What I do want to talk about is energy and energy policy, but it could easily have been about housing. It could easily have been about health care. It could easily have been about training. There are so many things where the former government completely vacated the field that I could be aggrieved about, but I think energy is probably the one which is both relevant and fundamental to the Australian economy.

Ultimately I'd like to surprise people a little bit by quoting Peter Dutton of all people. I thought that he summed it up perfectly when he said that energy is not just part of the economy; energy is the economy. From a historical point of view, we have seen that the 19th century was very much the birth of the Industrial Revolution, where we had coal and steam fired motors. The 20th century was about oil and the internal combustion engine. And the 21st century is very much going to be about electric motors and renewable energy. We've seen at each of those points in the past—when we started digging up coal, when we started drilling for oil—that living standards across our economies went up. They shot up through the roof. So it is, I think, the promise of renewable energy to lift living standards up even higher than we could possibly have imagined in the past.

Yet it is because of this ideological obsession—this is what I don't get about the opposition's policy. There is this ideological obsession with using coal—and now dangling out their promise of nuclear energy, which nobody's going to build—which is now the most expensive energy that you could want to use rather than renewable energy firmed by gas and batteries, which is the cheapest model of energy. The only way to explain this is that they've got this ideological obsession that prevents them from supporting the cheapest model, because, somehow, if you believe in coal and nuclear, then you don't believe in climate change. That gives them the free pass. They are so obsessed with fighting the science of climate change that they would rather choose the most expensive forms of power.

So it is that, through the course of the previous government, we've had this ideological fixation. So it is continuing today, I think, with the shadow Treasurer, who history will show is an even more radical shadow treasurer than John Hewson, who was bad enough in his time as shadow Treasurer. Now we've got a shadow Treasurer who is so fixated on this idea that the government should not be involved in health care, that superannuation shouldn't exist, that it should be all up to the individual, that people should have individualised health accounts rather than a universal scheme.

And so it will be on energy that we again see this complete denial of the reality, the complete denial of the economics. We'll end up in the situation where we are at the moment, which is—just to reinforce what the energy minister has been saying, while there isn't a supply problem, I totally understand why people feel that our energy supply is precarious. COVID really showed those first shocks, that we could be exposed so openly to the international market, and the latest conflict in the Middle East has really accelerated that. We saw oil prices jump from $60 to $120 yesterday. They're back down to about $80. When Australians see that, just like all of us in here, we feel it in our bones that there is something wrong with our economy.

When the Abbott coalition government came to power in 2013, there were six oil refineries in this country. When the coalition government lost power, there were two. It was only because of the pressure put on the coalition by the Labor Party at the time to protect those refineries—a policy which has been continued—that we still have those two. Otherwise, the ideology that the other side continue to espouse, the total abandonment of government involvement, would have seen those refineries walk, just as those opposite encouraged the car industry to walk. A fact about chemistry, which I learnt only recently, is that you can store oil longer than you can store fuel, so it is vital that Australia has that sovereign capacity. It is only because of the actions of the Labor government that we still have those two refineries left. Heaven forbid what would happen should those opposite get back into government!

Another thing is the actual cost to the economy of the inaction of those opposite. As the Australian Energy Market Commission said, 'Delaying the connection of renewable generation and transmission into the market would put upward pressure on residential electricity costs.' So why do those opposite want to delay it? What is it that they have got against renewable energy so much that they want to put that at risk?

The fact is, Australia had a very strong economy post-World War II because governments did get involved in the economy. For instance, we had great publicly owned electricity assets around the country. Unfortunately, under Liberal governments we've seen them privatised or corporatised to the point now where they don't play a useful role in helping to keep the cost of living down for workers or for businesses. It's now got to the point where privatisation and economic rationalism are now having a negative impact on the economy. But it is something they want to continue for some ideological reason.

It's the same philosophy that saw 24 out of 28 coal-fired power stations close down. It's the same philosophy that saw four gigawatts of energy leave the system and one gigawatt of energy come on. It's the same philosophy that actually doesn't care about the results and doesn't care about the impact it has on people's lives. They are trying to appeal to a very narrow base of people who are obsessed with fighting the science of climate change, who are obsessed with a very sterile ideology of removing the government from the economy. Those opposite are obsessed with an ideology that comes at the expense of actual results for people.

And so it is, in my first grievance debate, that I would like to get that off my chest on behalf of everybody who is struggling to pay a bill, on behalf of every business that is struggling. And before they start saying it is the current government, the opposition should take a look at their own record from when they were in government to what they are continuing to do now and what, heaven forbid, should happen if they got in again.

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