The chickens are coming home to roost. There is no doubt about that. Over the last decade or so we have madly persisted on seeking to turn our energy system into one that is almost completely reliant on the weather and we’re now left with the absurd situation where two Labor state governments in our biggest states announced over the last week that they will subsidise coal-fired power stations. That’s the farce that our energy system has descended into. After a decade or so of saying that we don’t need coal-fired power anymore because we’ve got the wind and the sun is free—it’s all going to be rainbows and unicorns—we now have the situation where we’re having to subsidise old inefficient coal-fired power stations in both New South Wales and Victoria just to keep the lights on.
What is absolutely and abundantly clear now is that the path we’re on is a path to ruination as a nation. The path we’re on is a path to higher power bills. The path we’re on is a path to losing our jobs and our manufacturing industries to other nations who are not as silly as us.
We have been installing solar and wind energy at a rate four times higher per person than North America and Europe. I often hear from the other side that the former government didn’t invest enough in solar and wind or in renewable power, but how much is enough? We’re running at a rate four times higher than Europe and North America. No country is going further and faster down this route than Australia, and the results are all around us to see.
The other thing I often hear from government senators and members of the other place is that the former government failed because four gigawatts of baseload power came out of the system over that decade or so and only one gigawatt was installed to replace it. That is true. That is a fair criticism of energy policy over the past 10 or so years. A lack of planning and foresight led to the fact that we have almost exclusively relied on power options that we can’t rely on all the time. They’re not baseload power. Solar and wind certainly are not. Some other forms of power, such as gas peaking plants, are not.
We have shut down our power stations that could run 24 hours a day and we are left with things that run only some of the time. Solar and wind power are basically the dole bludgers of the energy system—they only turn up to work when they want to; they’re not there all the time for us—whereas our baseload coal-fired power stations and our hydro, generally speaking, as long as there is enough rain are there for us whenever we need them.
We need to desperately fix that three-gigawatt gap. It has actually grown further since the new government was elected. We just shut down the Liddell coal-fired power station. It was originally 1,600 megawatts and 1,200 megawatts when it shut. So we are down something like four to 4½ gigawatts of power compared to a decade or so ago. Where are we filling that gap from? Nothing the government is doing right now is filling that gap. For all their rhetoric about how terrible the former government was in taking our baseload power, they’re doing absolutely nothing to fix that very same gap that they identify in their rhetoric.
There are no baseload power projects that the government is backing right now. There’s a gas peaking plant in Newcastle. Who knows what’s happening with that? They’re not very happy with that. They seem to be going on the go-slow with that. That’s not baseload. There is the Snowy Hydro scheme, which is mired in cost blowouts. It may never happen. We’re probably not going to see it this decade. So where is the solution? The Australian people are sick and tired of the politics that are being played on this issue. They’re paying for it in their higher power bills.
I’m standing here saying the coalition government didn’t get it all right but certainly the Labor government is not doing anything to fix it. It’s time for us to get real and fix it, and that means—it’s a very simple response here—we need to build power stations that are on all the time. That is coal, that is gas, and in the future it could be nuclear as well. Let’s get on with building them. I’ve been saying this for a long, long time. When I first started really campaigning for this, in about 2016, I was told: ‘It will take too long to build a coal-fired power station, Matt. It’s going to take us five or six years.’ Well, it’s been longer than that since I started saying this, and the responses we did come up with, like Snowy Hydro, are possibly still a decade away.
Let’s get on. The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, no doubt about that, but the second-best time is today. We should stop the politics, stop the rot, stop the excuses and actually build things that work, that we know can save our jobs, that we know can keep our lights on and, most importantly of all, that we know can get power bills down so Australian families can actually manage their budgets.
