I want to ring a warning bell this evening, a warning bell that should be ringing a lot louder than it is across our land. Last week, our major energy regulator, the Australian Energy Market Operator, revealed that we couldn’t guarantee that the lights would stay on in Australia over the next three years. We’re a developed nation. We’re a nation blessed with energy reserves. We’re the world’s largest coal and liquified natural gas exporter. Yet, in the next three years, we cannot guarantee to Australians that their lights will stay on. It is a damning indictment of the policy settings that we have been obsessed with over the past decade in this place, and I have been critical of my own side on those settings. We’ve been obsessed with installing unreliable, renewable energy, and our energy system is about to crash unless we do something about it.
We are installing solar and wind in Australia faster than anywhere else in the world, by a large margin. Don’t listen to the rhetoric from the new government that somehow the coalition government didn’t invest in renewable energy. That is a lie—that is a total deadset lie. The Australian Energy Market Operator also said a few weeks ago in their integrated system plan that here in Australia we are installing solar and wind at a rate four times higher than Europe or North America. We have retired 4.1 gigawatts of reliable power—dispatchable power, in the jargon—over the last decade. That’s about four major power stations, and we have only replaced that with less than one gigawatt of reliable power. We have a reliability deficit in this country; when the sun sets and the wind doesn’t blow, we are in big trouble. In this latest Australian Energy Market Operator report they say that, over the next three years, three states will fall into deficit in being able to meet the reliability standards to keep the lights on all the time in this country. The first is South Australia next year, the first on the chopping block, then Victoria and, the year after that, New South Wales. Queensland will also have some issues later in the decade.
We need to change now and change fast. Yet, instead, this new government is doubling down on the failed policies of the last decade—the failed policies in Europe, the failed policies in California. As I speak today, there have been blackouts in California, another region leading the world in renewable energy that’s not doing so well. We are doubling down on this despite the warnings of people like Paul Broad, who has resigned as the CEO of Snowy Hydro because the new minister, Chris Bowen, won’t listen to common sense. If the lights do go out in the next three years, if we do get blackouts, we can blame one group of people in here. The one group of people we can blame is the Australian Labor Party, who are ignoring the expert advice.
Chris Bowen is clearly ignoring the advice of Paul Broad, who said to him in no uncertain terms and has said publicly since in an interview with the ABC that green hydrogen cannot be added to the Kurri Kurri gas plant next year and we should proceed with that gas plant just on gas to start with, as per the original plan. Instead, Chris Bowen has effectively sacked Paul Broad—and the rumour around the industry is that he was effectively told by the minister to go, which is totally scandalous ministerial intervention in what should be an independent statutory authority. He’s ignoring that advice and persisting with a technology which has not been tried anywhere—putting hydrogen into a gas plant. We don’t even know if it’s going to be safe. It’s a very flammable material. This is ridiculous. We need to keep our lights on. Further to that, I give credit to Paul Broad for having the courage to resign his position, instead of being asked to do something he knew would increase risks and would not deliver results to the Australian people. But his further advice to the Australian people when interviewed was that it’s not just Kurri Kurri; we should be building more gas plants—more than just Kurri Kurri.
That is clearly shown in this report of the Australian Energy Market Operator that I started my contribution with tonight. That report says we’ll have inadequate investments in reliable power in the years ahead to guarantee electricity supplies. When are we going to listen? When are we going to wake up? Are we going to wait until we have another South Australia, and the lights go out everywhere? Are we going to wait until thousands more manufacturing jobs leave these shores to benefit the Chinese communist party and Vladimir Putin’s Russia? Are we going to wait until we end up in a situation like the United Kingdom’s facing, where people’s energy bills are A$6,200, or 3,549 pounds, and they’re estimated to go to over A$10,000 over the next year? Are we going to wait until Australians are suffering in poverty and energy deficiencies before we act and make commonsense decisions to guarantee the basic essentials in a developed country blessed with energy resources?
