QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE: TAKE NOTE OF ANSWERS

Senator CANAVAN (Queensland—Nationals Whip in the Senate) (15:02): I move: That the Senate take note of the answers given by the Minister for Industry and Innovation (Senator Ayres) to questions without notice asked by Opposition senators today relating to electricity prices. Today, we see in this country the very concerning news that yet another manufacturing facility may be set to close.

This is becoming too frequent. It is a sad outcome in our nation—a nation that was proudly making things up to just a few years ago, a nation that proudly had some of the best manufacturing workers in the world. Some of the greatest innovations that have been done in the world were done by Australians.

Those things were done because we had an advantage. We had a natural advantage as a nation, having access not only to some of the world's best resources but also to some of the world's best energy resources. We do have high wages in this country.

We have high costs, and that's a good thing. But the fact that we had cheap energy allowed us to pay those high wages. The former chairman of the Productivity Commission eloquently made the point, a few months ago, that the cheap energy that Australians had access to allowed us to pay dear wages.

We are, unfortunately, losing that natural advantage in front of our eyes. It's lost, perhaps. I don't want to give up hope.

The current government, I think, have seemingly waved the white flag here and decided that we must just be consigned to now having some of the highest power prices in the world. I'm not giving up just yet, because we have all of this energy that can be unlocked for the use of Australians. We export it to the world.

We export coal, we export gas and we export uranium to the world but, apparently, we can't use it ourselves. Today we have learnt that a fantastic facility in New South Wales, the Tomago Aluminium smelter, may have to shut because energy prices are too high. Aluminium has a very energy-intensive manufacturing process.

We are, again, lucky to have some of the best bauxite reserves in the world. In fact, most aluminium smelters in the world are made to use alumina which comes from the bauxite of Cape York, around Weipa. On the back of that, around 50 years ago Australia built its own aluminium industry at Tomago in Newcastle, using the beautiful thermal coal—probably the world's best—around the Hunter Valley to refine the alumina to make aluminium.

We had it at Gladstone, at Kwinana and in Tasmania, at Bell Bay. We as a nation were an aluminium powerhouse. That could all be lost on the altar of chasing the ability to claim to the United Nations and other global institutions that somehow we can cut our emissions faster than anyone else—and we are doing it faster than anyone else.

We as a nation are cutting our carbon emissions at double the rate of other advanced economies—not just China and India. Obviously, they're going gangbusters on carbon emissions, but put them to one side. We are cutting our emissions in this country at double the rate of the OECD—double the rate of the developed world.

That is now having a consequence. What today's news shows is that the green energy chickens are coming home to roost. We've made all these promises.

There's all this flowery language. We heard it from the minister in the chamber. We heard the minister say that we've got to do this because we've got to have a transition.

Imagine this bloke, the minister for industry, getting up in front of the thousand union workers who are about to lose their jobs and telling them, 'I'm sorry about the heartache you and your families are about to suffer through, but we have to transition.' This is the once-proud Labor Party, who used to hate this corporate gobbledegook that big corporates and big businesses rely on when they have to sack thousands of people.

That's what they say. They get up and say, 'We've got to rationalise, modernise and globalise, and you all lose your jobs.' That's what big-business people say, and now that's what the Labor Party repeat in this place. You can just substitute them.

You can substitute those guys over there for any management executive, consulting firm or big accounting firm in this country. They talk to them all the time, and they start speaking like them. What do you think?

What message have you guys got for the thousand people who are going to lose their jobs? Don't you want to save them? Don't you want to come up with a plan to save those jobs?

Green energy's not going to cut it. It's not working, guys. It's failing everywhere it's been tried.

There is not one country in the world that has massively increased its solar and wind energy and ended up with cheaper power prices. It hasn't happened. The evidence is in.

So, before more people lose their jobs, how about you reflect on what is going on and change things to help them, not you? (Time expired)