Matthew Canavan (Queensland, Liberal National Party, Minister for Resources and Northern Australia) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the senator for that question, a senator who I know is a strong supporter of our coal sector—as is this government. We are a strong supporter of the thousands of Australians who work in coal. We are a strong supporter of coal jobs. We back coal jobs, we back the wealth that they create and we back the ability of those jobs to help people own their own homes, put their kids into school and live a good and decent life as Australians. It is an incredibly important sector.

Often we think about the coal sector in this country as the exports that we provide to the rest of the world, and it is true that around 90 per cent of the coal we produce is exported to other countries. It provides those countries with a low-cost source of power and an ability to make steel, but, of course, it is still an essential part of our own energy mix. It accounts for just over 60 per cent of our electricity sources in this country. On the eastern seaboard, in the National Electricity Market, more than 70 per cent of our electricity is generated by coal. We need coal to keep the lights on in this country. We need coal to make sure that we can provide cheap, affordable and reliable power to our manufacturing sector, for those manufacturing jobs that Senator Carr so eloquently tries to defend. We need coal to help those jobs.

Senator Hanson-Young interjecting—

We need coal, and that is why this government is backing coal: so that we back jobs in this country. If you want to back jobs in Australia, you have to back our coal sector. If you want to back jobs in manufacturing, you have to back coal—there is no other way we can have it. Our coal industry can contribute to our goals to be cleaner and more environmentally sustainable. The latest and most advanced forms of coal-fired power can bring down emissions by up to 30 per cent. If we replaced our entire coal fleet with these facilities, they would bring down emissions by up to 27 per cent in the coal sector. They are part of our solution, they are part of our energy mix, and this government supports them. (Time expired)