Senate debates

Monday, 13 August 2018

Questions without Notice: Take Note of Answers

Energy

3:08 pm

Photo of Jenny McAllisterJenny McAllister (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answers given by the Minister for Education and Training (Senator Birmingham) to questions without notice asked by Senators Marshall and Gallacher today relating to the National Energy Guarantee.

What a mess! What a mess energy policy is! We are five years into this government, and consumers are feeling the pain because the government has been completely unable, for the entire time that it has been in office, to settle upon an energy policy that will provide for the needs of Australian families and Australian businesses. And it's no good, really, coming in here and seeking to put the blame elsewhere—to blame it on the opposition, to blame it on previous governments, to blame it on unspecified dark forces operating in the community or to blame it on energy businesses—because there is only one group of people who should be taking responsibility for the current turn of events, and that is the government.

The reason they have been unable to settle on a policy was in full display here in question time. At one end of the chamber, we had Senator Birmingham prattling on—reasonably sensibly, I suppose—with some of the information provided to him by the actual policy analysts who are supporting the government in their energy policy. At the other end, we've got Senator Canavan, whose relentless support for coal in the face of all of the evidence—in the face of all of the advice from the business community, in the face of all of the advice from energy companies—that coal is not financeable, that new coal generation is not the way of the future, persists. And he's not alone. Both Mr Pasin and Mr Craig Kelly have been out, in recent weeks, casting doubt on the National Energy Guarantee.

And what do we see today? We see the Prime Minister, yet again dancing to the tune of this group of people who refuse to engage with reality, placing a drop to a couple of journos that they are going to possibly, at some point in time, contemplate underwriting new generation capacity. It's a funny way to do it, isn't it? It's a weird kind of broadcasting to get it onto the front page of a major newspaper. It would have been much more efficient to just pick up the phone, surely. They have a lovely directory over there for the House of Representatives. You can find the telephone number for Mr Pasin and for Mr Craig Kelly. You can pick it up and telephone them. But it seems to be beyond the reach of the Prime Minister to gain support from his backbench for a rational approach to energy policy. It's long past time that the government adopted one. It's time to come to grips with reality. It's time to come to grips with the advice that's been provided by organisations like the ACCC, the AEMO and the Australian Energy Market Commission. It is time to get a grip on what is happening in the energy system.

There's been a lot of talk about the reports that were put out by some of those organisations and how they support new coal-fired generation. I can tell you they do no such thing. In fact, the AEMO report could not be clearer about what the future mix of energy supply in this country will be. They say:

When existing thermal generation reaches the end of its technical life and retires, the most cost-effective replacement of its energy production, based on current cost projections, is a portfolio of utility-scale renewable generation, energy storage, distributed energy resources (DER), flexible thermal capacity including gas-powered generation (GPG), and transmission.

There's no mention of coal, because coal is not the cheapest form of generation when we need to replace our existing assets. And that was quietly, just now, confirmed by Senator Birmingham. He ran through the new projects that show up in the modelling, that are assumed when the modelling is undertaken. There was not a new coal-fired power station among them. And it's absolutely consistent with what the government has been told by others. The Energy Council has said that new coal-fired power stations are uninvestable. The Energy Security Board, these hand-picked advisors, has said:

… there would be absolutely no way that anybody would be financing a new coal-fired generation plant.

The ACCC has made it very clear that its recommendation that government underwrite some of the risk associated with investment in new generation is not in any way targeted at coal. It is time for the government to come to grips with the technological and market reality about new generation and to stop pandering to its backbench, because it comes at the cost of Australian consumers.

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