Sean Bell (NSW, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) | Hansard source

I'm glad Senator Ayres is paying attention to this speech. He's paying a little bit more attention than the minister was paying to our press release on keeping Australians safe. It's good to see you paying attention. You are switching off now!

We've got a Labor government breaking the energy system. Then who do they call when they've done this, when they've driven up electricity prices so high that once-profitable manufacturing businesses can no longer compete? Who do they call in? They're forced to go back to the taxpayer because the net zero obsession that they have has meant, for these once-profitable industries that provided jobs and security to the people of our country, to the people of the Hunter and to the people of New South Wales, they've destroyed them.

We know that Tomago needs huge amounts of reliable electricity 24 hours a day. You cannot tell an aluminium smelter to wait until the wind picks up. You cannot shut the pots down when solar generation disappears. You need dependable power. After years of closing the reliable generation and forcing the system towards intermittent renewables, Labor is now spending billions to compensate a major industrial user for the cost of that policy. For that sort of money, Australia should be asking how much permanent, reliable energy generation we could have built instead. One Nation has been pointing this out. We've been calling on the government to invest in coal-fired power stations. But they've let the ones that we have fall apart. They've abandoned them. In doing so, they've abandoned the reliable, affordable, effective energy generation that powered things like Tomago.

Now they're asking the taxpayer to power Tomago. There's no way to infinitely bail our way out. The promises they make about intermittent power are simply not true. Windmills and industrial-scale solar blanketing agricultural land is not the solution. Then they won't even consider things like nuclear. That's all because anything down that path destroys their argument, destroys their vehicle towards the targets that they have legislated and set for their net zero obsession.

How many more industries could we have if we had even more coal fired power, if we had even more reliable generation? They're bailing out Tomago, but think about how much more we could have if we had even more coal fired power. The opportunity cost that we have witnessed and the amount of loss and decline we have seen from Labor's failure to secure reliable dispatchable power in favour of intermittency boggles the mind. That is Labor's net zero economics. Labor's obsession with making energy expensive is what's putting Australia's industry in danger.