Electricity Infrastructure Legislation Amendment Bill 2025

Mr BUCHHOLZ (Wright) (17:45): It's an absolute privilege to follow the member for Mallee. I want to affirm the comments made in this chamber by the member for Mallee and the way she has articulated some of the failings of this government as set out in this legislation, the Electricity Infrastructure Legislation Amendment Bill 2025. For a starting point, I want to put on the record that there are those in this place that start their assumptions of the Liberal Party with none of us believing in renewable energy.

Well, I shared this story with my colleagues before the debate started. I live in a regional precinct, and I had a journalist here in Canberra once say to me, 'When are you guys'—meaning the Liberal Party—'going to get on board with renewable energy?' You should have seen their face change—and it really gave light to what the Canberra bubble is—when I explained to them that I live in a regional area and that they would be hard pressed to find a single farm that did not have a windmill on it supplied by a company called Southern Cross Windmills.

Their head office is situated in my electorate, and this year they are celebrating 150 years of manufacturing, making us the early adopters of renewable energy. When those windmills failed and we had to adopt new technologies, do you know what the technology was that most farmers went to? It was solar panels to run little Honda motor pumps to pump water for stock and for irrigation to provide the protein, to provide the fibre, to provide the vegetables—the food that goes on the plates of Australians.

We were the early adopters. I can tell the Labor Party something for nothing. If you want people to get on board with renewable energy, then you're doing exactly the wrong thing by making it even more expensive to use renewable energy.

We were told on more than 200 occasions by those on the other side that under a Labor government power prices would be $275 cheaper—that the wind blew for free and that the sunshine was free. They led people along, led the Australian people along, on the understanding that their power prices would go down. With the members in this chamber at the moment I could do a straw poll and ask them to think of their last electricity bill.

I know what mine was. My electricity bill at home was over $2½ thousand for the quarter. Go back three years when Labor was first elected, when we left office, the same power bill was 1,200 bucks.

That's my household. I challenge— Mr Laxale: Mine was 30 bucks. I've got solar and battery.

Mr BUCHHOLZ: That's excellent. Embrace the technology. Mr Laxale: That's right— Mr BUCHHOLZ: But why is there— Mr Laxale interjecting— Mr BUCHHOLZ: My point— The DEPUTY SPEAKER ( Ms Scrymgour ): Come on— Mr BUCHHOLZ: No, I can accept the interjections.

But the household price, regardless of the household benefits you're getting, has skyrocketed 83 per cent since the Labor government come to office. There is no disputing that, and that is just in the last year. Bowen promised, when Labor first came to office, that by 2025 he would get the wholesale price to $51 a megawatt.

Do you know where it currently sits, in the last year? Double that. The wholesale price is up around the $100 mark and has been for the entire year.

Since this Labor government has come to office, I have seen crisis after crisis after crisis—a housing crisis, a cost-of-living crisis and now an energy crisis. Why are we dealing with this legislation today? I remember one of the last sitting days of the last session of parliament; I think there were 31 pieces of legislation that were rushed through the parliament.

There was no debate allowed on any of them. There was no contribution to be made. There was no scrutiny.

There was no nothing. And at the core of this piece of legislation now, which arguably has had little or zero consultation with the public, the government is seeking to unwind those very bills that it looked to fast-track through this place. They rushed it and they made a mistake.

As a result, there are unintended consequences of this piece of legislation, and it's why we will be opposing it. I'll tell you what else gets people in regional Australia cranky: it's when the permits for windmills and solar farms get put in. I take this from a group of farmers whom I had the privilege of catching up with in Gladstone; they were from a small community called Kabra.

They were complaining that the country that they owned that was being eartagged for wind turbine development was subject to a different set of rules that they were—the people who owned the place. If they wanted to build a road up to the top of the hill and clear a pad to build some infrastructure or a beautiful house site, that would not have been permitted for them as householders.

But complete strangers could come in with the protection provided by the EPBC Act that made them exempt from the very rules that would have applied to the farmers. Not only are they getting it wrong on the other side of this chamber, but they're also upsetting honest, hardworking Australian men and women in regional Australia, who are having to put up with the consequences of this sham legislation.

The Kabra families were concerned for the livestock that they had. They voiced to us a number of concerns that they had about construction, but, most of all, as I said, they were concerned about the inequity—that there was one rule for the developer and then there was one rule for them. They thought that that was just simply un-Australian.

As I said earlier on, the Prime Minister promised on many occasions to cut power bills by $275, but, instead, families are paying more than a thousand dollars under this costly and chaotic energy policy. Moody's last week confirmed that the installation of renewables would cost about $230 billion over the next 10 years and that that could only drive electricity prices up another 25 per cent in time.

There are families that don't have solar panels and batteries and are in the same situation as I and many other Australians are, where our power bills are incrementally increasing under the failed environmental and energy policy that this government presides over. Can I remind you how hard it will be for those that are already at the brink? Throughout my electorate, I have a number of churches and charity groups.

Out the back of most of them—St Vincent de Paul and the Salvation Army—they'll have food banks and they will provide cash. This will be my sixth election, and there was a period of time early in my representing the community when I would attend these food banks to assist and offer my time. Those presenting would be people that had fallen on hardship, like kids renting.

The new norm at these food banks is mums and dads who work every day. They're putting their kids through school, but, under this government, the pressures on the family budget are so clumsy, so incumbent and so prominent that they're relying on the charity of others in the community just to get by. I think it's absolutely farcical that the Prime Minister, early in the piece when campaigning at the last election, said that things would be better under a Labor government.

I assure you that for many hundreds and hundreds of families in my electorate that is far from the case. This energy bill is only part of it. I worry about the future as we move into election mode.

What power will our country have? What will our energy prices look like in the event of there being a hung parliament with Labor at the helm and a teal-Greens crossbench? I can't think of a single teal seat or Greens seat that's got a wind turbine farm in it.

They're all united in the fact that they want them. But guess where they want them? They want them in my beautiful backyard; they want them on my farms.

They want them on the people of Canberra's farms, they want them in regional Australia, and they want them in regional Queensland. We are saying: 'You can't have this double standard. If you want them, you have them.

You take them in your electorate. Don't jam them down our throats.' One of the local government authority areas in my electorate is called the Scenic Rim. Just think of those two beautiful words—pristine.

Without a doubt, in a heartbeat, people in inner-city Brisbane are saying, 'You've got to have them out in your area because we just can't have them here in my electorate.' Labor's renewable-only approach isn't working. I can't think of one matrix where they are meeting their targets. Our option is for a balanced energy mix.

We want to be clean, and we want to be consistent with the pathway forward. We've had an open discussion with the Australian public about nuclear. We want to have a conversation about gas.

We will have a conversation about high-energy low-emissions coal-fired power stations. Our coal exports have actually increased under Labor. For a period of time, our coal exports surpassed our iron ore exports.

We don't talk about that. It was interesting to hear the member for Sturt talk about our uranium deposits; they're the largest in the world. What are the emissions from uranium?

They are zero. We heard other speakers speak about reclamation work on coalmines. But where is the standard to be applied to the reclamation costs for pulling out wind turbines and solar panels?

What's the cost of trying to dispose of those assets? It's all uncosted; it's all unknown. But when we put up a costing to say, 'This is what it's going to cost, and the life of a nuclear power plant can be over 80 to 100 years,' the zealots come out and say, 'We can't have clean energy that way.' It's their whole modus operandi.

It's how they treat the farmer: 'There's one set of rules for the turbine and one set of rules for the farmer. We'll calculate nuclear one way and we'll calculate the disposal of renewable assets a completely different way. In fact, we may not even calculate that to put it into our overall prices.' People are seeing through this.

The Australian public are seeing through it. They are reminded about the farce every time their power bill arrives. For colleagues in the House, I will be opposing this bill.

I oppose this bill because it was ill thought out. It shouldn't have seen the light of day in the first place. I understand what Labor are trying to do.

They're trying to fix an anomaly that was rushed through the parliament without scrutiny, and they've been caught. I oppose the bill, and I oppose the increase in power bills from this bill. We oppose Labor's higher energy prices.

Only a Dutton led government will fix Australia.