Andrew Bartlett (Queensland, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I have already moved to take note of document No. 25 on today's Notice Paper: National Energy Guarantee—Modelling—Order agreed to on 13 August 2018—Letter to the President of the Senate from the Minister for Education and Training (Senator Birmingham). I am continuing my remarks from when I did move to take note of this. This was a document that was tabled earlier this week in response to an order of the Senate—the motion moved by the Greens to get the government to table its full modelling that it is using to justify its claims of so-called price drops under the National Energy Guarantee. I am sure this so-called modelling—or the non-existent modelling—was referred to in the general business debate we had earlier this afternoon, which I didn't get a chance to speak to. But it does need to be re-emphasised, simply in regard to just one aspect which demonstrates, on its own, just how flimsy and hollow is the government's whole series of claims around what the National Energy Guarantee will supposedly achieve.

We all know that what the NEG will achieve is the gutting of the renewable energy industry and all of the jobs associated with that, many of which are in regional parts of Queensland and other regional areas around Australia. We already know that it's going to make us completely fall short of our obligations, entered into by this government, in regard to climate or greenhouse emissions under the Paris Agreement.

But the claim that is meant to justify all this is about the price drops that will allegedly occur. What is clear from the evidence provided by those who actually do understand the economics and the science behind this is that the price drops that will occur into the future will be driven by the expansion of clean energy—renewable energy. Yet this government, of course, wants to do all it can—in fact, it wants to spend money—to expand coal-powered generation, which is the most expensive and will become even more expensive in the future.

There had initially been something released which was simply a single spreadsheet with no assumptions provided about the figures on that spreadsheet and how they were derived. So the forlorn hope of the Senate, in passing the order for the government to produce this document, was that there would be something behind the numbers on this single Excel spreadsheet that would actually back up the claims and provide some genuine modelling. This document should in future really go down as a case study of how badly the political process had degenerated in Australia when a single page like this could somehow be used—it's too small to even be a fig leaf, frankly—to justify the wildest claims about what is an important issue for Australians: ways to reduce energy prices.

I will point out that the Greens have clearly detailed policies about the best way to genuinely reduce energy prices. And these have been independently costed by experts. In the Queensland election, the Queensland Greens released our energy policies which, independent experts had demonstrated, would actually have driven prices down lower than the proposals of either Labor or the LNP, and would do so in a way that was sustainable into the future, by reversing the privatisation mania of both coalition and Labor governments of the past and also ensuring that it was clean energy and job-generating energy.

This government, because of its own internal political incoherence and its own internal political divisions, can't produce anything that will deliver anything. It won't deliver the price cuts they say it will, it won't deliver reductions in emissions, and it won't deliver in regard to renewable energy or job generation. This single document, tabled earlier this week pursuant to Senate order, simply shows that this government's claims on the National Energy Guarantee have zero substance. Once again, they are failing to deliver for the general public. They're failing to deliver any sort of energy policy that will provide a future for all of us.

Question agreed to.