Ben Small (Forrest, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Last Thursday, in a committee room just downstairs from this chamber, the Minister for Climate Change and Energy, Chris Bowen, announced the granting of additional preliminary feasibility licences for proponents proposing to build offshore wind in Geographe Bay, which is of course just off the coast of my electorate of Forrest.

I want to take the chamber back to the beginning of this process, when the government announced a consultation process for local people to have a say. From wild scenes, frankly, at the Binningup Surf Life Saving Club, through to the many hundreds of people that attended the department led consultation in Bunbury and asked valid questions but left without any answers, through to the 300 people that requisitioned a City of Busselton special ratepayer meeting out of sheer frustration at how inadequate the federal government led consultation process had been, my electorate has been clear: this is a project that doesn't suit our coastline. They've asked simple questions and been denied answers by this government at every turn.

If we look at the simple proposition of offshore wind overseas, we see significant projects on the eastern seaboard of the United States having been cancelled due to significant cost escalations. We've seen the largest project in Sweden go bankrupt and, of course, we've seen the largest manufacturers of turbines in the world making significant parts of their manufacturing workforce redundant due to decreasing demand for offshore wind turbines globally. It begs the question as to why we are pursuing this madness and why we are pursuing this madness with such fervour.

So it was with some surprise, having campaigned so strongly against offshore wind Geographe Bay, that I recently received an invitation from the Danish consulate to attend a delegation to visit and to examine the offshore wind industry in Denmark. After writing back to them and suggesting that, as a fierce critic of these proposals, my place was not amongst their trip, they in fact explicitly invited me again because of my strident opposition to this. So, having taken the decision to attend—and I am paying for my own flights because that is the right thing to do—I will be taking an open mind on the trip and asking those simple questions that the people of Forrest have been unable to get answers to from this government. They will be centred on economics. Will this make power cheaper, cleaner and more consistent in the SA West integrated system? Will it result in lower power prices for households and businesses in the south-west? Are the very genuine questions around environmental risk, with it being centred on a whale migration superhighway, in fact debunked by the science or, as I see it, hotly contested? These are the questions I'm looking for answers for.