Matthew Canavan (Queensland, Liberal National Party) Share this | Hansard source

The government's continuing excuses for why their net zero agenda is not delivering lower power prices for the Australian people are wearing thin. They're wearing thin with the Australian people because constantly they get lectured that renewables are the cheapest form of power, that the government is investing in the lowest cost and that you'll get a $275 reduction in your power bill. And then your power bill turns up, and they keep going up and up and up. And now we have some of the highest electricity prices in the world despite having some of the best energy resources in the world, and there's no coherent explanation for why this is the case. The only thing now that the government resorts to is to effectively tell the Australian people not to believe your lying eyes. You can see your power bill go up every quarter. You can see our manufacturing industry being shipped offshore day after day, and yet the government continues to gaslight you—which is ironic, because they don't like gas—by saying, 'No, no, no, what we are doing is actually the cheapest way of delivering energy.' It's exactly not what the government's plan is at all.

The government continues now—or those who do support net zero—to be completely dishonest with the Australian people, and that is what this motion calls for. This motion calls for an honest debate about how much this so-called net zero transition will cost the Australian people. I just heard there from the previous speaker that the CSIRO says that renewables are the cheapest. They say not that at all. Their latest report says that in 2024—these are their latest numbers—coal is $111 a megawatt hour and a solar, wind and firm system is $116 a megawatt hour. They're the numbers. Now, in my maths, when I was at school, 111 was less than 116. So coal is the cheapest form of power—and note that I use the verb 'is', the present tense. In the present tense, in the present world, coal is the cheapest form of power, according to the CSIRO.

Now, I don't think we should just leave it to the likes of the CSIRO, because they've got things so wrong so often. So has AEMO. We hear, 'Let's listen to the Australian Energy Market Operator.' They've got it wrong, time and time again. I don't want to listen to the people who've got it wrong all the time; I want to listen to the workers out there who have lost their jobs in the nickel industry, in the plastics industry, in the urea industry—jobs that have all been shipped overseas since we started on this crazy agenda. When are we going to listen to them? I want to listen to the Australian families who can't afford to pay their bills anymore, not just because their electricity bills are going up but also because the cost of electricity flows through to the cost of everything. The Page Research Centre did a report earlier this year which showed that the increased costs of electricity in this country have also added $3,400 to the budgets of Australians through the extra costs of energy in producing groceries and moving yourself around this country. It is crippling our economy—this agenda that is putting the targeting of emissions reduction above all other goals.

I've always supported a reasonable reduction in our emissions, but I don't support it at the cost of destroying our economy—even at the cost, sometimes, of destroying our environment. This net zero agenda is now destroying koala habitats left, right and centre around our country, presumably and seemingly with no concern from those pursuing the agenda. It is just not working for the Australian people.

In terms of what the overall cost is, we know that a group called Net Zero Australia, a consortium of universities—the University of Melbourne, Princeton University and the University of Queensland—did an estimate of how much it's going to cost to get to net zero, and this is from the media release that was released by the University of Melbourne:

The cost of the transition is estimated at around $7-9 trillion invested in domestic energy and industrial infrastructure by 2060, around six times the business-as-usual amount.

Six times! And how much is $7 trillion to $9 trillion? Well, that is more than $250,000 for every Australian. Has there been an honest debate from those pushing net zero? Is it worth every Australian, on average, having to lose resources equivalent to $250,000 per person in this country—six times what it would cost to simply deliver energy like we have before? This is from people who support net zero; they're not against it. All these universities support it, and that's the estimate they put on it.

But we haven't had any economic modelling from the government about their targets and how much they're going to cost the Australian people. Net zero is costing Australians an arm and a leg, and it's about time we had a commonsense debate about it and a more reasonable option for the Australian people.