PRIVATE MEMBERS' BUSINESS
Mr FARLEY (Farrer) (11:16): You cannot operate, manufacture, live or defend a nation with intermittent energy. You cannot run an electrical grid on intermittent energy. Europe proved that this summer.
Ask any child; there is no fun in a flat battery. We are seeing superficial public displays of moral correctness and not-in-my-backyard attitudes that seek personal virtue: 'I will pollute and destroy your backyard. Who are you to challenge my virtuous intentions from my city based operations?' CO2 does not distinguish between a coal-fired power plant, a concrete plant and a steel mill.
The only distinction is that one is honest about its footprint while the other markets its footprint as virtue seeking. This is irresponsible investment for future generations. We've got hundreds of thousands of hectares of black solar panels across prime agricultural land.
Some of these installations have arrived with PFAS chemicals that will pollute that land forever. Agricultural land and, more importantly, in some areas, major irrigated agricultural land will be lost to this nonsense. Solar panels are actually interfering with the natural ecology of the entomology and the life cycles of our farming operations.
They're not allowing frost to reach the soil to eliminate overwintering of pest insects. They're even going further. Tasmania is identified already as only having 500 pairs of wedge-tailed eagles.
To date, we've had 321 reported incidences, of which 271 have killed wedge-tailed eagles. To put that in perspective, we can't even push past a thousand pairs in Australia. They're the numbers we know, not the numbers we don't know.
It's positioning us not to be internationally competitive, priced with electricity. It's got a limited operational life. It is not an intergenerational investment.
When you study the prospectuses, it's also got built-in price inflation. More importantly, the liability of this infrastructure—where does it stay? It's not socialised.
It stays with the landholder. It stays within the regional communities. Just have a look at the Wellington solar fire and the travesty behind that.
But you'd have to ask yourself while all this is going on and as the world advances past us: why is Australia a laggard in exploring nuclear energy? All we're doing at the moment is building a system of an imperfect grid to allow the system to be rorted. We're actually building another Enron—those that convert their solar energy into batteries and wait for the price to spike at night, then deliver to the grid.
Again, this is Enron version 2.0, coming to Australia. The institutional spin frames the issue as a storage problem we've got with our electrical grid. It's more than that; it's the system itself.
The system is revealing that the fundamental is in the design flaw. We're delivering the next generation of Australians a liability—a liability that they can't operate with, they can't grow with and they can't manufacture with. More importantly, they will be responsible for dissembling and burying non-recyclable products.
The DEPUTY SPEAKER ( Mr Buchholz ): There being no further speakers, the debate is adjourned and the resumption of the debate will be made an order of the day for the next day of sitting.