Karen Grogan (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

What a rich amount of interesting commentary to respond to here! The desperation of Senator Duniam was quite outstanding. I'm not entirely sure what he's so scared of, or is he just trying to get enough social media grabs to run some form of scare campaign that has no basis in reality? Any which way, I don't know that he really referenced any part of the actual bill in his commentary, so it could be that we need to go through some of those elements so that people are really clear about the content of the Electricity Infrastructure Legislation Amendment Bill 2025. I don't think there was anything that Senator Duniam said that actually has any basis in the intent of this legislation.

Let's just be really clear: there is no majority in this chamber. There is no majority party in here. We, as the Albanese Labor government, invite every single senator across this chamber—it doesn't matter who you are—to embrace the great Labor agenda that we have set. We encourage you to come forward and support it because we do believe it is the future. It is where we should be going to protect jobs, to build our economy and to ensure we have a clean and sustainable future. In the context of this bill, that is a clean energy future with more manufacturing, better jobs and a stronger economy, making more of what we need right here at home with clean energy from the abundant renewable resources that we have in this country. We are luckier than so many parts of the world. The abundance of available resources for renewable energy is amazing, and what we are trying to do is harness it. What those opposite are trying to do is to go back to the Dark Ages and not embrace that clean energy future that the majority of the rest of the world is embracing. So let's go to a little bit of what this bill is actually about.