Tim Ayres (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Industry and Innovation) Share this | Hansard source

I'll just say that today in the electricity system there are 3.8 gigawatts of outages in the coal-fired electricity system—a thousand of those are planned and 2.8 gigawatts are unplanned. This is in the system that this lot thinks should be doubled, tripled or whatever the latest policy catastrophe is that it emerges from over there.

Today, when we have representatives from our Pacific partners and their faith groups in the building, we have catastrophic fire danger in the lower Central West plains and the highest November temperatures in years in Sydney and Brisbane. We are a party that takes climate change and emissions policy seriously. I think those opposite only remember the political embarrassment from 2019 and the bushfire season. We remember the human cost, the social cost, the economic cost and the environmental cost. They just remember the political embarrassment of what happens when you don't have a serious approach to climate, to energy, to climate adaptation and to building an energy system that is in Australia's interests.

Our plan to lower emissions will deliver the cheapest possible energy for families and businesses. It's why we've got the Cheaper Home Batteries scheme, cutting power bills already for more than 100,000 households—most of them in our outer suburbs—and adding more than 1,000 new households every day. That's what these people want to campaign against. That's why we have the Solar Sharer scheme, giving people and businesses free electricity in the middle of the day, and there's plenty more.