QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE

Senator AYRES (New South Wales—Minister for Industry and Innovation and Minister for Science) (14:41): Well, here I am. Senator Roberts's question really does bell the cat in terms of where One Nation and their almost coalition partners over here in the National and Liberal parties really are on some of these climate and energy questions. If I go directly to Senator Roberts's question, the unreliability of our current aging coal-fired power fleet is, as I cursorily read in the newspaper, what I think Minister Bowen was referring to.

What is going on every single day is that there is an unplanned outage of one or more of these facilities. That unplanned redundancy causes additional cost, puts pressure on industry and reminds Australians that, under the previous government, with all of that uncertainty and all of that policy failure—I'll come back and let you know, Senator Roberts, if I get this wrong—I think 24 out of 28 coal-fired power stations announced their closure.

And what do we have from the Liberals and Nationals? Relitigation the same old nonsense that held Australia back—a $600 billion nuclear power plan and Mr Littleproud saying, 'We should sweat these assets.' If you went to some of these power stations in New South Wales, you would know that the only people that would say you should sweat that asset would be someone who had never been to one.

(Time expired.) The PRESIDENT: Senator Roberts, first supplementary?