PRIVATE MEMBERS' BUSINESS
Mr JOYCE (New England) (11:06): I move: That this House: (1) condemns the Government for its continued rollout of renewable energy precincts in regional communities, including the New England Renewable Energy Zone and Central West Orana Renewable Energy Zone, without due regard for the impact on agriculture, landowners, community, infrastructure and the productive landscape; (2) notes that: (a) regional Australians are being asked to carry the burden of a policy that is driving up the cost of living, increasing pressure on electricity prices, and undermining reliable and affordable power for households, small businesses and industry; and (b) the rollout of large-scale wind, solar, battery and transmission projects is desecrating rural landscapes, creating uninsurable properties, dividing communities, and imposing industrial-scale infrastructure across farms, towns and natural environments that have sustained regional Australia for generations; (3) recognises that: (a) the Government's approach amounts to the socialisation of private assets, where public money, public guarantees and publicly backed schemes are used to underwrite private renewable energy developments and transmission projects; and (b) intermittent power does not provide the affordable or reliable base load electricity needed to run a modern economy, and that the failure of intermittent generation is being masked by secretive capacity investment schemes and opaque market interventions; (4) further notes, with concern, the severe impact on small regional communities from the construction of renewable energy precincts, including the arrival of hundreds of temporary workers, demand for already limited housing, pressure on local roads, health services, schools, water, policing and emergency services, and disruption to community life; (5) calls on the Government to immediately pause the rollout of renewable energy precincts where local communities have not been properly consulted and where the full economic, social, environmental and infrastructure costs have not been independently assessed; and (6) supports the establishment of a Royal Commission into the rollout of renewable energy precincts across regional Australia, including their effect on cost of living, energy reliability, private property rights, public expenditure, local infrastructure, community cohesion and the long-term future of regional landscapes.
It's amazing. I read today that now the Greens in Tasmania have an issue with intermittent power, the swindle factory wind turbines, and they have joined with One Nation in their opposition to the wind towers because they kill one raptor per year per tower. And then the transmission lines are another mechanism that is killing the wildlife.
So, the ecology and the environmental benefit of these are an absolute load of tripe. They are a swindle. They are there for the benefit of billionaires and overseas companies supported by secret capacity investment schemes.
That me moves on to another thing I read in the paper about the coalition. They're onto the case of the secret capacity investment schemes, and they've got major questions to ask. I've been asking those questions for years.
What's it all about? They're an absolute rip off. How can you have a secret agreement with the taxpayers' money and then believe there's some virtue in it.
Even in the budget papers, it's NFP—not for publication. For so long I've been saying 'look under the bonnet of this', and we now see the major mastheads in the media asking major questions because it is just so murky. It is just so sleazy.
It is just so sneaky and it's causing so much hurt. Now I can assure you that the intermittent power sector is quickly running out of friends. In our areas now they talk about 1,200 workers flying in and flying out, going to villages of 300 and 800 in another area.
People are predominantly coming in from overseas. There are no police to look after them, no hospitals. How do you deal with the crime rates and issues like that?
How do we manage it? But it doesn't matter because we're in regional Australia and the virtue of it is so people can say, 'I'm doing something about climate change.' You're not actually. You're just helping a select clique of people become incredibly wealthy, and you're totally naive in your process of doing that.
There's no change to the weather because of this. It's just a massive change to people's bank balances as other people become poorer. Pensioners become poorer.
At Tomago the other day they came up with a $2.5 billion package. I'm fascinated by this. I went back and read what Neville Wran said.
He used to be a genuine Labor Party member back in 1984, and he was talking about how good it was opening Eraring, a big coal-fired power station, and how the coal-fired power stations of the Hunter Valley had supported the opening of a new massive aluminium industry in Tomago. Now it's his own party closing it down. Unless you change the price of energy Tomago is gone.
And when did it work really well? When it had coal-fired power. There were no support packages for Tomago when it had coal-fired power.
When we remove the secrecy of these agreements and capacity investment schemes—and One Nation will—they'll lose their legitimacy. When we see that something is not quite right, One Nation will take this to a royal commission. If the royal commissioner can come up with a brief that says there was corruption, then some of these people can trot off to jail, because that's what you do when you come up with dirty, sneaky little agreements; we're trying to work out how they got so much money, but at the time they wouldn't tell you.
They won't tell you how much money they're dishing out to these people. For us, it's quite obvious. We have seen what has happened to regional Australia with the transmission lines and the fields of photovoltaic black.
When we look into those now, we find that all they're worried about is the value of what they've put on, not the efficacy with which it works. We're getting all the time breakdowns, wrong cabling, fires and areas with wind towers where they can't produce what their plate value said. One Nation has led the charge; now other people are joining, and there are no votes in this anymore.
It is a deadset vote loser. If there's only one thing I get out of the swindling, intermittent power sector, it's this: every time Minister Bowen or someone from the Labor Party talks about it, your vote goes down, and our vote goes up. The DEPUTY SPEAKER ( Mr Buchholz ): Is there a seconder?
Mr Farley: I second the motion.