SENATORS STATEMENTS – Energy Security

Central Queensland is getting a little bit tired of the Labor Party using it as a political backdrop to paper over the cracks in its own energy policy. Ever since the 2019 election gave the Labor Party an unexpected defeat, it has been trying to rationalise the fact that it won’t support the major industry of Central Queensland, the coal sector, while still purporting to try and represent that area of the country. Its solution was not to try and reflect on whether or not it should support Australia’s biggest export, one of the major industries bankrolling this nation; instead it concocted a fantasy that somehow we could close down this major industry of Australia and simply create another one out of thin air—literally out of air—called the hydrogen industry. Ever since, for the last five years, we have heard on repeat, every time a Labor Party senator comes into Central Queensland, how we’re all going to get these amazing jobs and business opportunities in the hydrogen sector. It was always a bit of a fantasy. Sir Joh actually tried this 40 years ago. He announced the hydrogen car back in the early 1980s, but it never came to be. The old physics joke is that hydrogen is just 20 years away, but the problem is it’s always 20 years away. There’s nothing wrong with thinking big and maybe doing research into something that might pay off in the future, but there is something very, very wrong in gambling people’s real jobs and real businesses on a risk. It may not happen. There has never been a certainty that hydrogen will ever produce a commercial amount of jobs and opportunities for Australians, and there is certainly no certainty—almost no possibility—that it would do so in just a few years time. But that’s the myth. That’s the lie that we’ve been told in Central Queensland time and time again. The lie is being exposed now, though, somewhat ironically by one of the biggest backers of this hydrogen fantasy. In the last few weeks, Mr Twiggy Forrest, who has been a very successful Australian businessman to date, has announced that he’s dropping his fantastical hydrogen dream of trying to produce 15 million tonnes of hydrogen by In announcing it he actually sacked 700 people. It’s an absolute tragedy for those people who lost their jobs, but it should be an alarm bell to the rest of us that we should not gamble the tens of thousands of jobs in industries like the coal sector on something that clearly has a lot of risk associated with it. Twiggy Forrest has worked out that we’re not going to produce a commercially viable hydrogen industry in the next few years and—let’s face it— probably not in the next decade. So let’s drop this fantasy and let’s support the hardworking men and women who are already in industries in this country that produce a lot of wealth for our nation and that are growing around the world. Again, despite what you hear time and time again from this government, demand for coal around the world is growing. Last year there was a record amount of coal used. Demand for high-quality coal in particular is growing very, very quickly. Just to the north of us, in Indonesia they have, amazingly, in just two years increased their production of coal by 150 million tonnes. To put that in context, most would recall the controversy we had around the Adani Carmichael mine. For all the ink that was spilled in our newspapers about that mine, that mine is 10 million tonnes a year. So, in two years, Indonesia has opened the equivalent of 15 Adanis. You don’t hear that reported, but that’s the kind of growth you’re seeing. In India, they’ve increased their coal production over the same time period of two years by 200 million tonnes. They’ve built 20 Adanis. And our friends up there in China always win the gold medal on these measures They have produced an extra 548 million tonnes of coal a year in just two years—that’s extra. China already produces around five billion tonnes of coal a year; it’s increased that by over 500 million tonnes—55 Adanis, if you like—in just two years. It’s time we get with the program. It’s time we drop all of the myths and fairytales we are fed constantly because
of the tough times Australian families are facing right now. The cost of living, the weak economy and rising interest rates are happening at least in part because we have a Labor Party that won’t face reality but will continue to live in a fantasy world where we can just invent industries. We need to get back to producing what our customers demand, and that is cheap and affordable energy like coal.