STATEMENTS BY SENATORS – Net Zero

I want to briefly pay tribute to the work of Chris Uhlmann, who last night had a desperately needed investigation of the real cost of net zero aired on the Sky News channel. Chris is one of our nation’s most intrepid, serious and considered journalists, and he’s gone where very few people have been willing to tread in the last few years and actually investigated in a detailed way why Australians are all paying so much for energy when we live in one of the corners of the world most blessed with energy resources. I think many Australians are perplexed as to why their power bills keep going up and up and up to the point that they are some of the highest in the world even though we have all of this coal, which we continue to export to other countries to use, we have all of this gas, and until recently we were the world’s largest exporter of liquefied gas, and we have the world’s largest uranium reserves as well, which of course we also export but ban for use by Australians themselves. It’s a crushing story for many Australians, no more highlighted than by the tragic story shown by Chris of the pensioner who lives here in the ACT who struggles now to pay her bills because of her power bill. The ABC kind of kicked Chris out because he wanted to look at this stuff. The ABC is not doing it. Other media aren’t doing it. Sky News have done it. Unfortunately of course they’re a company that has to make money. They don’t get public funding. So this documentary will set you back $5 to watch. Just sign up to the Sky News stream service. But I would encourage all Australians to check it out. It’s a small proportion of your bill. In fact your average bills these days are about $2,000 a year, so this is just 0.25 per cent of your bill to watch an investigation of what
the hell is going on. At the core of what is going on is that the people making decisions about our very complex modern energy system have no idea what they’re doing. It’s as simple as that. They have no idea what they’re doing. I remember being in a ministerial council meeting on energy, a subcommittee of the COAG group, just after the South Australia blackout. I was actually in Adelaide the night that happened, and it made me appreciate the wonders of modern street lighting. The whole city was black. I felt a little trepidatious walking out on the street. It was pitch black. The whole place had gone off. After the first meeting of the state and federal ministers, the then head of the Australian Energy Market Operator was explaining to all the ministers about how the lights that we were sitting under at the time in that conference room—these ones here too—are actually flickering on and off all the time. You just can’t see it with the naked eye. But they’re actually going on and off all the time. They’re going on and off at a sine frequency of 50 hertz. It was pretty clear to me that, for almost everybody in that room, officials and ministers, it was the first time we were hearing this particular bit of information. Yet ministers have been taking it on themselves to tinker with this complex engineering system and say stupid things like: ‘The sun is free. The wind doesn’t send a bill.’ That’s a direct quote from our energy minister at the moment. Therefore investing in solar and wind will be cheap. It’s the most juvenile analysis you’ve ever heard, and we’re all paying the price because of its childish nature. Of course, as Chris showed in great and understandable
detail last night, the wind and sun may be free but the solar panels aren’t, the wind turbines are not and the transmission lines you have to build to go there are certainly not free. Of course probably the biggest issue of them all is that, when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine, you need something to back it all up to keep the lights on. All of those factors mean that the average costs of providing electricity to Australians are going up and up and up, and it’s the average Australian suffering. It’s not just them. I also want to congratulate the likes of Cadbury, who had the guts to come out and call out the surging power costs that they face. It’s flowing through of course to the cost of food, but it’s also threatening the viability of manufacturing in this country. We have to deal with this. I encourage people to watch Chris’s investigation, but most of all I encourage those ministers and officials who remain ignorant to watch this documentary. The government should finally commission a proper cost-benefit study of the goal of net zero emissions. It should have been done before. It shouldn’t have been left up to Chris Uhlmann. But it’s not too late to correct the errors of this insane policy.