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

Well, when the lights go out, Australians can be confident what the reason is. It's because these old coal plants shut without warning. They love these old coal-fired power stations over there. They want to invest public money in them—unless poor old Senator Bragg gets his Don Quixote tilting-at-windmills hopeful campaign up—sweating these plants for longer. When there's an unplanned outage, which happens every day, what happens? There are reliability challenges, but, also, power prices go up. Power prices go up because what's required is for our gas power stations to step in, and that pushes the price of power up. Your plan, your legacy, is higher prices, less investment and less generation.