Barnaby Joyce (New England, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That this House:

(1) condemns the Government for its continued rollout of renewable energy precincts in regional communities, including the New England Renewable Energy Zone and Central West Orana Renewable Energy Zone, without due regard for the impact on agriculture, landowners, community, infrastructure and the productive landscape;

(2) notes that:

(a) regional Australians are being asked to carry the burden of a policy that is driving up the cost of living, increasing pressure on electricity prices, and undermining reliable and affordable power for households, small businesses and industry; and

(b) the rollout of large-scale wind, solar, battery and transmission projects is desecrating rural landscapes, creating uninsurable properties, dividing communities, and imposing industrial-scale infrastructure across farms, towns and natural environments that have sustained regional Australia for generations;

(3) recognises that:

(a) the Government's approach amounts to the socialisation of private assets, where public money, public guarantees and publicly backed schemes are used to underwrite private renewable energy developments and transmission projects; and

(b) intermittent power does not provide the affordable or reliable base load electricity needed to run a modern economy, and that the failure of intermittent generation is being masked by secretive capacity investment schemes and opaque market interventions;

(4) further notes, with concern, the severe impact on small regional communities from the construction of renewable energy precincts, including the arrival of hundreds of temporary workers, demand for already limited housing, pressure on local roads, health services, schools, water, policing and emergency services, and disruption to community life;

(5) calls on the Government to immediately pause the rollout of renewable energy precincts where local communities have not been properly consulted and where the full economic, social, environmental and infrastructure costs have not been independently assessed; and

(6) supports the establishment of a Royal Commission into the rollout of renewable energy precincts across regional Australia, including their effect on cost of living, energy reliability, private property rights, public expenditure, local infrastructure, community cohesion and the long-term future of regional landscapes.

It's amazing. I read today that now the Greens in Tasmania have an issue with intermittent power, the swindle factory wind turbines, and they have joined with One Nation in their opposition to the wind towers because they kill one raptor per year per tower. And then the transmission lines are another mechanism that is killing the wildlife. So, the ecology and the environmental benefit of these are an absolute load of tripe. They are a swindle. They are there for the benefit of billionaires and overseas companies supported by secret capacity investment schemes.

That me moves on to another thing I read in the paper about the coalition. They're onto the case of the secret capacity investment schemes, and they've got major questions to ask. I've been asking those questions for years. What's it all about? They're an absolute rip off. How can you have a secret agreement with the taxpayers' money and then believe there's some virtue in it. Even in the budget papers, it's NFP—not for publication. For so long I've been saying 'look under the bonnet of this', and we now see the major mastheads in the media asking major questions because it is just so murky. It is just so sleazy. It is just so sneaky and it's causing so much hurt.

Now I can assure you that the intermittent power sector is quickly running out of friends. In our areas now they talk about 1,200 workers flying in and flying out, going to villages of 300 and 800 in another area. People are predominantly coming in from overseas. There are no police to look after them, no hospitals. How do you deal with the crime rates and issues like that? How do we manage it? But it doesn't matter because we're in regional Australia and the virtue of it is so people can say, 'I'm doing something about climate change.' You're not actually. You're just helping a select clique of people become incredibly wealthy, and you're totally naive in your process of doing that. There's no change to the weather because of this. It's just a massive change to people's bank balances as other people become poorer. Pensioners become poorer.

At Tomago the other day they came up with a $2.5 billion package. I'm fascinated by this. I went back and read what Neville Wran said. He used to be a genuine Labor Party member back in 1984, and he was talking about how good it was opening Eraring, a big coal-fired power station, and how the coal-fired power stations of the Hunter Valley had supported the opening of a new massive aluminium industry in Tomago. Now it's his own party closing it down. Unless you change the price of energy Tomago is gone. And when did it work really well? When it had coal-fired power. There were no support packages for Tomago when it had coal-fired power.

When we remove the secrecy of these agreements and capacity investment schemes—and One Nation will—they'll lose their legitimacy. When we see that something is not quite right, One Nation will take this to a royal commission. If the royal commissioner can come up with a brief that says there was corruption, then some of these people can trot off to jail, because that's what you do when you come up with dirty, sneaky little agreements; we're trying to work out how they got so much money, but at the time they wouldn't tell you. They won't tell you how much money they're dishing out to these people.

For us, it's quite obvious. We have seen what has happened to regional Australia with the transmission lines and the fields of photovoltaic black. When we look into those now, we find that all they're worried about is the value of what they've put on, not the efficacy with which it works. We're getting all the time breakdowns, wrong cabling, fires and areas with wind towers where they can't produce what their plate value said. One Nation has led the charge; now other people are joining, and there are no votes in this anymore. It is a deadset vote loser. If there's only one thing I get out of the swindling, intermittent power sector, it's this: every time Minister Bowen or someone from the Labor Party talks about it, your vote goes down, and our vote goes up.

Scott Buchholz (Wright, Liberal Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

Is there a seconder?

David Farley (Farrer, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

I second the motion.

Emma Comer (Petrie, Australian Labor Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

I represent Petrie in South-East Queensland. I do not pretend that my community has exactly the same experiences as a farmer hosting transmission infrastructure or a small regional town dealing with sudden construction workforce. Those impacts are real, and regional communities deserve to be listened to. But Australia's energy system does not stop at electorate boundaries. The electricity generated in regional Australia powers homes, hospitals and businesses right across the country. Its reliability and affordability matter just as much to the families in Redcliffe, Fitzgibbon, North Lakes and Deception Bay as they do to communities like New England or Central-West Orana. And we have to deal with the energy system we actually have.

Barnaby Joyce (New England, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

The clock was not started for the Member for Petrie.

Scott Buchholz (Wright, Liberal Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the honourable member. In continuation, I give the call to the member for Petrie. You've got an extra couple of minutes, now.

Emma Comer (Petrie, Australian Labor Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

Fabulous. Thank you, Deputy Speaker, and thank you, Member for New England. Australia's coal-fired power stations are aging, breaking down, becoming more unreliable and retiring. For a decade, the former government, which the member for New England was a part of, delayed the investment needed to replace them. Twenty-four out of 28 coal-fired power stations brought forward their closure dates while the coalition was in office. And, just to remind you, the member for New England was a member of that coalition.

The question is not whether our electricity system changes; it is how we manage that change in the cheapest, most reliable and most responsible way. AEMO's 2026 Integrated System Plan is clear: renewable energy connected by upgraded networks, firmed by storage and backed up by gas is the cheapest pathway as coal retires. CSIRO's latest GenCost report also finds solar and onshore wind form the basis of the lowest-cost generation mix for Australia. That matters, because this motion claims renewable energy is driving power prices up. The evidence does not support this claim.

The Australian Energy Regulator's Default Market Offer 2026-27 is delivering lower prices in South-East Queensland. Standard residential prices are down 7.2 per cent, and time-of-use prices are down 10.7 per cent. Small business's reductions are larger again. The Australian Energy Market Commission has also warned that delays to renewable energy generation and transmission risk putting upward pressure on electricity costs. Pausing this transition is not a plan for cheaper power; it risks making the problem worse.

Supporting renewable energy does not mean giving developers a blank cheque or telling regional communities to simply put up with whatever change comes their way. If projects put pressure on housing, roads, health services or emergency services, that needs to be planned for.

Landholders deserve fair treatment, good information and genuine consultation, and developers should be held to proper standards. That is why this government has strengthened the Australian Energy Infrastructure Commissioner, supported by the Developer Rating Scheme, and established national guidelines for community engagement and benefit sharing around transmission projects. The answer to legitimate concerns is better consultation, stronger standards and fairer benefits; it is not stopping the infrastructure the country needs or debating the economic benefits of renewables, all while ageing coal generators continue to retire.

The member for New England also gives the impression that renewable energy and agriculture cannot coexist, but the department estimates that less than 0.1 per cent of agricultural land in the National Electricity Market jurisdictions would directly host renewable energy infrastructure under the relevant AEMO scenario. We also know that many landholders can continue agricultural production while receiving additional income from renewable projects. And I, for one, want to see additional income go to our farmers; they're the backbone of our country.

There's another part of this debate worth remembering. The member for New England has not always spoken about renewable energy the way he does in this motion. In 2017, he said renewable energy was 'an important part of the national energy mix', and then he celebrated that New England 'is leading the way in renewable energy production'. He was right then, and we are right now.

Regional Australia can be an energy powerhouse. It can attract investment, create jobs, provide new income streams for landholders and help power the nation. But those communities must be partners in the transition, not an afterthought. We can support regional communities and build renewable energy. We can protect agricultural land and modernise the grid. We can demand proper consultation and still get on with replacing ageing coal. What we cannot do—

Scott Buchholz (Wright, Liberal Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the honourable member for her contribution. I give the call to the most honourable member for Farrer.

David Farley (Farrer, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

You cannot operate, manufacture, live or defend a nation with intermittent energy. You cannot run an electrical grid on intermittent energy. Europe proved that this summer. Ask any child; there is no fun in a flat battery. We are seeing superficial public displays of moral correctness and not-in-my-backyard attitudes that seek personal virtue: 'I will pollute and destroy your backyard. Who are you to challenge my virtuous intentions from my city based operations?' CO2 does not distinguish between a coal-fired power plant, a concrete plant and a steel mill. The only distinction is that one is honest about its footprint while the other markets its footprint as virtue seeking.

This is irresponsible investment for future generations. We've got hundreds of thousands of hectares of black solar panels across prime agricultural land. Some of these installations have arrived with PFAS chemicals that will pollute that land forever. Agricultural land and, more importantly, in some areas, major irrigated agricultural land will be lost to this nonsense.

Solar panels are actually interfering with the natural ecology of the entomology and the life cycles of our farming operations. They're not allowing frost to reach the soil to eliminate overwintering of pest insects. They're even going further. Tasmania is identified already as only having 500 pairs of wedge-tailed eagles. To date, we've had 321 reported incidences, of which 271 have killed wedge-tailed eagles. To put that in perspective, we can't even push past a thousand pairs in Australia. They're the numbers we know, not the numbers we don't know.

It's positioning us not to be internationally competitive, priced with electricity. It's got a limited operational life. It is not an intergenerational investment. When you study the prospectuses, it's also got built-in price inflation. More importantly, the liability of this infrastructure—where does it stay? It's not socialised. It stays with the landholder. It stays within the regional communities. Just have a look at the Wellington solar fire and the travesty behind that.

But you'd have to ask yourself while all this is going on and as the world advances past us: why is Australia a laggard in exploring nuclear energy? All we're doing at the moment is building a system of an imperfect grid to allow the system to be rorted. We're actually building another Enron—those that convert their solar energy into batteries and wait for the price to spike at night, then deliver to the grid. Again, this is Enron version 2.0, coming to Australia.

The institutional spin frames the issue as a storage problem we've got with our electrical grid. It's more than that; it's the system itself. The system is revealing that the fundamental is in the design flaw. We're delivering the next generation of Australians a liability—a liability that they can't operate with, they can't grow with and they can't manufacture with. More importantly, they will be responsible for dissembling and burying non-recyclable products.

Scott Buchholz (Wright, Liberal Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

There being no further speakers, the debate is adjourned and the resumption of the debate will be made an order of the day for the next day of sitting.