COMMITTEES – Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport References Committee – Reference

For some months—in fact, years now—opposition senators have been calling to have a full and transparent inquiry into the rollout of huge amounts of wind turbines and solar panels across our farmlands and bushlands throughout Australia. For all of that time the government has been hiding,
delaying and dragging its feet, stopping a proper inquiry into its own policies. The only conclusion you can come to is that this government has a lot to hide when it comes to its renewable energy rollout. It doesn’t want that program to be subject to any kind of public scrutiny. I want to recognise the efforts of my colleagues. Senator Cadell has been ably leading the charge on this matter
for years now; it’s been many months. He’s showing incredible persistence to get to the bottom of it. Senator Colbeck, who is co-sponsoring this motion, is working hard on this as well as are many other members of parliament—from different political parties but, principally, from the Liberal and National parties—from areas where many of these projects are being rolled out. I know that last week, in the fallout—excuse the pun!—of the nuclear announcement, many people were saying, ‘Nobody would have a nuclear power station in their backyard.’ Some people would claim that people wouldn’t want a nuclear power station in their backyard. Well, I’m fine to have it in my backyard, perfectly fine. I’ve always said that. Some of them that the coalition has proposed are going to be not too far from where I live and some are going to be close to where I live. I have no problem with that at all. One thing I think many Australians wouldn’t even realise is that many do actually have a nuclear reactor in their backyard. In fact, there’s a nuclear reactor in our biggest city, so millions of Australians have, figuratively, a nuclear reactor in their backyard. We’ve had a nuclear reactor in south-west Sydney, at a location called Lucas Heights, since the 1960s. I think it was built in 1958. So, for more than 60 years, we’ve had a nuclear reactor. It’s actually the second reactor. It was rebuilt in the 2000s. We’ve had a nuclear reactor that whole time in that facility. I would hazard a guess that many Sydneysiders don’t even realise there is a nuclear reactor in their town. It goes
completely unremarked. It has been run incredibly safely; it’s a world-class facility. It does not generate electricity, but the nuclear reactor is a nuclear reactor. I’ve been out there a number of times and been told by those operating it that it could generate electricity but it is used, instead, to generate the nuclear medicines which save millions of Australians’ lives—in fact, one in two Australians, on average. About half of us over our lifetimes, on average, will require the use of medicines made through nuclear processes like those at Lucas Heights. That reactor exists there
and it is fine. People are happy with it. In fact, I had a look last week. In the closest suburb to Lucas Heights, a house 1.7 kilometres away, I think, but definitely under two kilometres away from the actual reactor—so we’re talking ‘backyard’—sold in March for $1.7 million. If people had a problem with nuclear reactors in their backyard, you wouldn’t think houses would be selling for nearly $2 million. It was a four-bedroom house. It looked like a nice home but not by any means a palace or
mansion, but it sold for $1.7 million. In fact, that suburb had an average price of over $1.2 million over the past 12 months, just hundreds of metres away from the nuclear reactor there. That’s in peoples’ backyards. But the funny thing is, we’ve been building solar factories and wind factories for a generation now, for over 20 years really, at an industrial scale here in Australia, and I don’t think Sydneysiders have a solar or wind factory in their backyard yet. So, they’re happy to have the nuclear reactor in their backyard. I do see a lot of people in Sydney wanting renewable energy, but I don’t see anybody out there saying, ‘Yes, please install a mass of hectares of solar and wind turbines off the coast of Manly Beach,’ or even on the outskirts of Sydney at Camden. I don’t see this groundswell of support for these facilities. No, they tend to be installed out in regional, country locations, and, typically, that’s where you’ll find members of the Liberal and National parties representing. So we are very much on the front line of this. I can tell you, as someone who lives in one of these areas, that I’ve met many more people who would have a nuclear reactor in their backyard over an industrial-scale solar or wind factory any day of the week. We all have a visual representation of what it means for people who live near these things, every day that we come to work. Every day we come to work there’s a big flagpole, over there, in the middle of the building, and there’s a big flag on top. I think I checked a while back and it sits at just over 200 metres tall or something like that. These big wind turbines now going up near where I live, just west of Rockhampton, sit at 275 metres tall to the tip of the blade. That’s bigger and taller than the flag here on Parliament House. If it was just one of them it might be, like the flagpole here, a bit of a spectacle. It’s something you look at and are inspired by, almost, every day. But there are hundreds of them going in across the beautiful, pristine, subtropical bushland just west of Rockhampton. That is just one project. There are hundreds more, thousands of them overall, across many projects in my area. That tends to get people a bit worried—having hundreds of Parliament House sized flagpoles dotted along what was otherwise previously a pristine landscape full of animals and natural habitat, supporting, of course, a very important ecosystem in my area, the Great Barrier Reef. We’ve been told for decades now that we can’t do much in these areas in the Great Barrier Reef catchment. Farmers can’t clear trees anymore. They’re not allowed to develop their land because, if they did, the sediment would run off to the rivers and catchments that flow to the Great Barrier Reef and that would destroy the coral in the reef. That’s what we’re told. Senator Hanson-Young and others have made this point many times. Yet, apparently, an overseas wind turbine investor can come to these areas in the Great Barrier Reef catchment area and use dynamite
to blow up the tops of mountains and push all that sediment over the side, where it will flow into the Fitzroy delta, out to the Great Barrier Reef and past the Keppels, and that’s no problem at all. There’s not even a murmur from the Greens political party about this environmental destruction. Why? It wouldn’t shock many people to know that I’m probably not the world’s biggest greenie, but I do care about our natural environment and I don’t think we should be blowing 20 metres off the top of these beautiful, pristine mountains which have sugar gliders, koalas and beautiful natural habitats. I care about koalas. I care very much about koalas. We aren’t going to save the polar bear,
Senator Hanson Young, by killing koalas, but that’s the approach at the moment. That is the approach: we kill these koala habitats and somehow that will save the polar bear. I don’t understand it. If you’re going to build a 275-metre tower, you need very strong foundations, obviously. You need, I’m told, a 200-by-200 square metre platform—As I was saying, these towers are 275 metres tall, and they need a 200-by-200 square metre flat pad. Obviously God didn’t create the mountains to have 200-by-200 square metre flat pads at the top of them. They come up to peaks. That’s why they have to take off, I’m told, as much as 20 metres of the peaks—resulting in a massive amount of sediment and environmental destruction—to put those wind turbines on. There has been a lot of talk about asking local people what they think and whether they would accept energy solutions in their area. We’ve seen lots of polling in the last week about nuclear reactors. Generally speaking, the Australian people would accept nuclear reactors. There are a majority of Australians who think that. In the areas that we have proposed that nuclear reactors go, there are again a majority of people saying they would. There are some people who are opposed, of course, but a majority are saying they would. Very rarely do we see our major media outlets poll these local towns about what they think about a wind factory and whether they would like those in their backyard. I’d be very interested to see the polling results on those. We saw some insights from the report of the independent Energy Infrastructure Commissioner, Mr Andrew Dyer, earlier this year. He spent months going around to these communities and talking to them about what they think of these large-scale industrial renewables projects. He did a survey of landowners in the area who are affected by these projects. The survey result that came back said that 89 per cent were not happy with how renewable energy was being rolled out in their areas. As I’ve said, in this area west of Rockhampton in Central Queensland, you’ll probably find more supporters of the Blues State of Origin team right now than you will find supporters of renewable energy. You never get 89 per cent. A lot of us do polling. It’s impossible, usually, to get 90 per cent of people to agree on something, but you do in the case of whether or not they’d like these large-scale, environmentally destructive wind turbines near their properties. That gets to the core of why the government is teaming up with the Greens here to deny an inquiry into these matters. They don’t want those 90 per cent of people to have their voices heard in this parliament. They don’t want them to have a spotlight put on them about why they’re concerned about these things. I genuinely believe that Australians do care about the feelings of those fellow Australians who live in the bush and who work in the bush. Many of these people—though not all—are farmers. They care about their fellow Australians’ opinions and views. If it were clearly expressed to them why these people don’t want these large-scale industrial projects destroying Australia’s pristine and beautiful bushland, very soon the Australian people would turn against this approach. That’s why the government is denying this. That’s why the government is seeking to gag those voices in rural and regional Australia from having their say on these projects. Despite those views not getting that airtime in our major media and in our major cities, Australians can see the complete failure of the government’s reckless renewables approach to lowering power bills. This government promised a few years ago, before the election—the Prime Minister promised personally almost 100 times—that they would lower your power bills by $275 by next financial year. That promise was for the 2024-25 financial year, so in just a few weeks that promise becomes due. Everyone knows, from the power bills they get every quarter, that the Prime Minister has broken his promise and that his proposal to go on this mad rush of renewable energy has not delivered the promised results. And this was not a throwaway line; this was the modelling the Prime Minister did. He stood behind it and said that he was confident that by investing in solar and wind resources they would lower power prices. The exact opposite has happened. On average, the average Australian household now has power bills that are more than $500 more than when the Prime Minister came to office, and many are paying $1,000 or $2,000 more, if they’re a large home with a large family. This model is clearly failing. And we sit here today facing the absurd situation where we’re looking at a risk of running out of gas this winter in a country blessed with abundant natural resources. We’re not Singapore. Singapore is a great place, but it doesn’t have natural resources. It’s not running out of gas. They don’t have winter in Singapore, but they do need air conditioning. They need electricity all year round, being on the equator. Singapore is not running out of gas, but Australia is, even with all our resources. There’s a very simple answer for why that’s happening. It’s because we’re obsessed with one type of electricity generation. We’re ignoring the need to develop our gas resources, our coal resources and our uranium resources, too. We need to get a better balance in this debate. We need to get away from this naive, juvenile idea that there is
somehow a silver bullet out there that can solve all our problems in one shot. We can’t maintain an industrial economy and manufacturing sector by just relying on energy sources that are dependent on the weather. That should be obvious, but, for those for whom it wasn’t obvious, it’s now plainly obvious, given the reality that’s biting us all right now. Likewise, my side of politics, as I often say, is not going to deliver those results just by installing nuclear power plants either. Any modern industrial economy needs a mix of energy types. We need gas to create fertilisers to grow food. Over half the world’s food is grown by using fossil fuel based fertilisers, primarily natural gas generated fertilisers. We need coal to maintain our heavy industry and manufacturing, which relies on very cheap reliable power, like our aluminium sector, which is a massively thriving part of our nation’s economy, underpinning tens of thousands of jobs. We need coal for that. And, yes, we should invest in nuclear too because it’s a modern technology that can also provide reliable power. For anyone who wants to bring down power prices for our country, we need a balanced mix of energy types. We need a proper investigation of this renewables rollout before it’s too late for many
Australians.