Barnaby Joyce (New England, National Party, Shadow Minister for Veterans' Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to touch on something that's incredibly important, and that is the price of power and the problems it's causing. Intertwined with that, of course, is the advent of renewables in the form of solar panels and wind farms. This is dividing our district. I went to a meeting the other day, and amongst the speakers were people from the Nationals, the Greens and the Labor Party, all saying, 'We do not want our area turned into an industrial park.' This is something that we feel is incredibly unfair, because people in the city areas don't have to deal with wind farms and solar panels, but Walcha are about to have 550 placed around the town, turning it into an industrial landscape. The issue is that it implies contingent liability that, if these things become irrelevant by reason of technology—it's static capital and raising technology—then farmers will probably have to be responsible for pulling them down. Like coal mines, where money has to be put into a trust for a rehabilitation, that is not the case for wind farms. And people say: 'Well, why is that they're not at Manly, Bellevue Hill or Toorak, but we have them here, scattered all over our land? Why are we once more the source of assuaging the moral issues pertinent to climate change in our areas, but other people don't have to wear it? We have to wear the industrial landscape; they have the benefit of feeling good.'

The thing that's going to put them out of date very quickly is the small modular reactor. A small modular reactor at 77 megawatts, that's 77,000 kilowatts—it takes about two to three kilowatts to run a house—that's 25,000 homes or about 64 to 65,000 people, for something that is approximately 20 metres high and 2.7 metres wide. That will take the place of 70 or 80 wind towers. As these come in, you won't be able to stop them because the world is moving on. It's like power iPhones. They'll arrive here, and we'll have to deal with them. And who's responsible for castigating the land with wind farms that will ultimately go out of date?

Today, in the chamber, the Prime Minister said, 'You brought a lump of coal in, don't bring a lump of uranium.' It just goes to show people's ignorance. Uranium 235 in its natural form, when it's dug up, is about 0.7 per cent radioactivity. Unless you intend to eat it or break it down with nitric acid and inject it, it's not going to kill you. In fact, it's quite safe.