MATTERS OF URGENCY – Energy

Most Australians would be aware of the energy crisis afflicting this nation. They need only consult—and, ultimately, pay—their bills. I know that these days many people are, tragically, struggling to pay their bills. They understand that we’re going through an absolute crisis in this country. Something is going massively wrong with our energy system when a country that is as blessed with natural energy resources as this one has among the highest energy prices in the world. This motion seeks to demonstrate to the Australian people that the reason for that is the heavy-handed red tape we’ve seen from this government that is stopping the extraction, the supply and the use of those abundant natural resources we have in this country, causing an increase in supply pressures, shortages and energy prices. Over the term of just two years of this Labor government, we have seen unprecedented interventions and heavyhanded regulation of the gas sector. We’ve seen the rolling back of industrial relations to the 1970s, with the energy crises and strikes that we saw in those days, and we’ve seen a complete lack of transparency on changes to environmental laws and regulations which is freaking out investors who might otherwise be looking at Australia. Last week we saw this highlighted, for all Australians, in two reports that came from government agencies. One of those reports was the gas supply outlook report produced by the Australian Energy Market Operator, and that report showed that, in the next few years, we could be facing the prospect of having to use diesel fuel in our nation’s gas-powered electricity power stations. So we have all this gas—we’ve got enormous amounts of gas in this country. Gas is used for about 10 per cent of our power needs in Australia, and it’s critical at peak times, critical when it’s hot or when it’s cold and energy use is at its highest. We need to have those gas-fired power stations to turn on and provide that additional bit of electricity. We’re running out of so much gas in this country now that the prospect is we’re going to have to chuck diesel fuel into these power stations to use. How is that good for the environment, if the diesel is effectively the most carbon intensive of all fuels? It’s very, very expensive, so that will only put more upward pressure on prices. This is happening because there has been a complete standstill on gas investment, as I mentioned. The government brought in these powers, unbelievable powers, that would allow a government minister to dictate to a gas company what they can charge, when they can produce, when they have to produce—the government can force them to drill and produce and sell at a price set by them. Obviously, anyone going into business or even thinking of starting a business probably wouldn’t like the prospect of the government being able to tell you when you have to open your doors and how much you can sell your products for. That tends to chill investment. That tends to ward off people spending the hundreds of millions and sometimes billions of dollars necessary to extract those energy resources and make sure that we have enough gas to supply our power systems. So we have seen a freeze on gas investment across this landscape. There’s a massive investment in western Queensland, in my state, proposed by Senex Energy. It could produce half of New South Wales’s energy needs. It’s completely held up at the moment. It was almost going to go ahead before these laws came in. Nothing has happened since on that project. This is why we’re facing those gas shortages. We’re now seeing the government bringing in a whole new environmental regulation framework that they are designing in secrecy. They’ve made businesses and companies in this country sign non-disclosure agreements—I think they’re the representative groups, I should say. They get taken into these back rooms and shown the laws that your taxpayer dollars have funded to write. We can’t see them. The people can’t see them. These large businesses and corporates and their representatives can see them, and they have to sign non-disclosure agreements. They can’t take anything out; they can’t take any photos, and we don’t know what’s in these, either. Again, what’s the message to any investors wanting to invest in Australian energy? They’re not going to invest right now because they don’t know what’s going to end up in these laws. They don’t know what’s going to happen when the laws come into this sausage factory and the Greens get their claws into them. Again, it might completely stop and chill all types of investments. The simple fact is that, if we want lower electricity prices, if you want to pay less on your electricity bill, we have to use more of our natural resources and we need a government that is supportive of developing Australia’s natural resources of coal, oil, gas and renewables of all types.