Malcolm Roberts (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Hansard source

Australian lives are getting more expensive every day because of net zero rorts. Power bills keep going up and the national debt keeps going up, because Australian taxpayers, renters, pensioners, small businesses and anyone who turns on a light are paying for rorts.

I use this opportunity to detail just one of these rorts—it's not illegal, yet it's completely unethical—occurring under the Capacity Investment Scheme. The Capacity Investment Scheme is a wind and solar slush fund that Minister Chris Bowen personally administers. I'm going to quote energy expert Aidan Morrison extensively, and we thank him for all of his contributions to the energy debate in this country. He said:

This is the story of how a fund chaired by former Labor PM Julia Gillard acquired a wind farm project just six days before Labor Energy Minister Chris Bowen underwrote its future revenues with taxpayer money.

Today we've learned Julia's fund is trying to flip it. For a profit.

HMC Capital's 'Energy Transition Fund' rushed to acquire the Neoen Victoria portfolio. They hadn't even raised any money in their fund. They closed with almost a billion dollars worth of borrowed money and IOU's.

Less than a week later, Chris Bowen announced Kentbruck Wind Farm to be successful in the first round of the Capacity Investment Scheme. My rough calculations suggest they will receive something like a billion dollars from taxpayers (and maybe much more) over 15 years.

Sweet deal. A billion dollars of fancy financial monopoly money one week. A billion dollars of promised taxpayer dollars the next.

…   …   …

Unlike the UK who publish a 'going rate' for technology subsidies, our renewables—

unreliables—

are subsidised through a secret tender process—

under the Capacity Investment Scheme. He went on to say:

Every project gets to ask for whatever revenue they want to proceed. @AEMO_Energy—

that's the Australian Energy Market Operator—

facilitates a secret beauty pageant, where they award points for things like indigenous participation or community engagement, alongside financial value.

And Chris Bowen makes the final call.

The bids remain secret. There's no cap to the pay-outs. Since AEMO is a private company, there is no scope for an FOI—

freedom of information—

request, and AEMO aren't not subject to parliamentary oversight through Senate Estimates.

So—

based on the public information—

no-one can ever prove an allegation that Bowen has bestowed special favour on a friend's project if that was what he did. But equally, he can never prove that he selected strictly according to merit. We are just expected to trust the black-box of Bowen's subsidies.

Mr Morrison continues in a reply to his post:

Originally it always appeared to me that @DCCEEW—

the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water—

would administer the scheme.

But Bowen is determined they don't administer it. In fact, going so far as to change the National Electricity Law to make it possible for AEMO Services to do it, and making an interim request to AEMO.

…   …   …

He could have just used the department, but that would make the process more transparent and accountable to parliament. He's basically cutting corners to cut out any chance of oversight.

In Mr Morrison's original post, he says:

Every dollar of profit in this industry—

the so-called solar and wind industry—

is really a cheque signed by a politician, with Chris Bowen signing all the biggest cheques, worth untold billions, in the next three years.

It's all legal. It's all official. And it's absolutely obscene.

The most concerning part of the Capacity Investment Scheme is that we have no idea how big it is. Right now, tens of billions of dollars may be getting handed out in lock-in contracts lasting for the next 15 years. Labor created the Capacity Investment Scheme in 2023. It's since proven extremely popular with solar and wind developers. I wonder why. Now, Minister Bowen wants to expand the program 15 per cent to 40 gigawatts. How many billions of dollars will all this cost taxpayers? We will likely never know. How much are overseas foreign companies ripping out of Australian taxpayers' pockets under the Capacity Investment Scheme? We will never know. With this level of secrecy, rorts are almost guaranteed—and for what?

The biased, discredited CSIRO GenCostreport on the cost of electricity was released just this week. You only have to skim the Centre for Independent Studies' energy publications to understand how, yet even CSIRO had to admit that the lower estimate for coal-fired power is cheaper than wind and solar. Now they admit it, after their fraudulent GenCost report. That's despite a secret model the CSIRO refuses to release to the public and a number of assumptions purpose-designed to make coal look worse than reality—fraud. Fundamentally, Australians have been lied to repeatedly by government agencies. Ditch the economic nonsense from net zero. Ditch the net zero nonsense, in fact. End the corruption. Put Australians first.