QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE: TAKE NOTE OF ANSWERS
Senator O'SULLIVAN (Western Australia) (15:13): You know, Deputy President, because I've told you, that I like this Senator Sterle—I reckon he's a ripper. He's one of the best senators they've got over there, frankly. He's a good man.
But I am going to take him to task on the opening comments he made, because they were absolutely ridiculous. He was trying to say that, somehow, it is our fault that energy prices have gone up because we didn't support the legislation that actually passed this parliament. The legislation that he refers to passed the last parliament.
What's been the effect? Power prices have gone up. In fact, they've skyrocketed.
They've skyrocketed so much so that Tomago, the aluminium plant, is at risk of closure—that's how much prices have gone up. Senator Ayres, when he was asked about that, rightfully pointed out that this is a very difficult day. I'll pause there for a moment and consider the people that are faced with the news today that their jobs are on the line.
Senator Ayres is right: this is a very difficult day for them to wake up, go to work and see that their jobs are on the line. But, Senator Ayres, in answering that question, trying to deflect and make out that we are politicising it and not considering the impact that it would have on those men and women in those jobs is the biggest act of, 'Don't look here; look somewhere else,' that you've ever seen.
It is absolutely appalling. There were two questions. I had a third one for you, Senator Wong.
Unfortunately, we didn't get the time to ask it today. There were two questions we had the opportunity to ask today. The first one was about secrecy.
The second one was about the collapse of the industrial confidence that is occurring in this country. One thing in common between both of those questions and both of the answers that we got on those points is that Labor's energy policy is failing. It is failing the Australian people, whether it's households, where the department of climate and energy's own incoming brief to the minister warned that household energy prices under their policies are going to continue to go up, or whether it is, indeed, industries that are depending on energy.
We asked a question about critical minerals and the fact that, for that vision to be fully realised, that great announcement that was made in Washington about an agreement that was made between the United States and Australia, it is going to take enormous amounts of energy. But we know that, under this government, under its plans, we're seeing energy prices skyrocket to the point where projects are unbackable.
What we've got to do is reverse this kind of thinking and get behind the lowest-cost energy and reliable energy. That's why costs are so high under renewable, because it doesn't have the reliability and so you don't have the ability to supply into that market, into those resources and into those energy-intensive industries. It's absolutely true.
On this issue of secrecy, my learned colleague from Western Australia Senator Dean Smith has the front page of the Australian today. I commend him for the tremendous work that he's been able to do. What that front page is about is the fact that, in getting back a document from the department of climate change and energy, 97 per cent of all pages supplied were redacted.
What does that mean? It means they were blacked out. There is one thing you don't do.
If you are going to redact a document, you are not redacting success; you are redacting failure. The only reason you would redact the document is that you are trying to hide away from the failure of your own policy and your own messages. If what the government is doing was successful then we would see it on full display.
You wouldn't see 97 per cent of the pages redacted. You wouldn't see big whole chunks of the document blacked out so no-one can read it and no-one can understand what's actually beneath the hood. That's what's going on with this government.
It's secrecy. They're hiding away. They can't stand up for their own success because they don't have any when it comes to energy policy.