PRIVATE MEMBERS' BUSINESS
Ms SPENDER (Wentworth) (11:11): I rise in support of this motion, and I thank the member for Indi for moving it. We are at a critical juncture. First, we need to build power in this country, across the country, including in regional areas.
This is critical for all of us, for the cheap energy of all Australians. It is critical for new and emerging energy needs such as in AI infrastructure, which is critical to our sovereignty as well. It's critical to our future opportunities.
We need to build it fast and we need to build it predictably. Second, the communities who host this energy infrastructure should receive a benefit from hosting it. This is obvious to most Australians but we do not yet have the proper legislative environment to make sure that actually happens and that is why this motion is so important.
Regional mayors have told me of communities plunged into blackouts, unable to access the very energy infrastructure their towns host. When Broken Hill lost power after a storm destroyed transmission towers in 2024, the residents reasonably expected that the big battery powered by the solar and wind farm nearby would be able to keep the lights on. But it didn't.
It took 10 days before an agreement was reached to allow the community to tap the source of energy they had been hosting in their own backyard. Many communities in regional Australia are not opposed at all to the development of renewable energy and of batteries. Many support it.
They see it as an opportunity. But what they do object to is being run roughshod over. Community benefit is a humble request for a partnership, one developers tell me that they are happy to meet.
Community benefit isn't new. New industries have always struck grand bargains. In the past, those bargains have looked like investment in anchor infrastructure—roads, ports, dams, pipelines, assets with positive spillovers that outlast the boom that built them.
It looked like a town pool and jobs for the locals. Today's infrastructure is more dispersed and passive—solar batteries, data centres—so the bargain will look different. Communities should have genuine agency over what that benefit looks like, shaped by their own needs.
But we also need national minimum standards. Clear expectations mean fewer fights and fewer delays, and a faster and fairer transition leaving host communities stronger. This is where the national government needs to step in, because we must go faster.
Renewables reached 43 per cent of our electricity last year, so to reach 82 per cent by 2030 means almost doubling that in four years, yet just 2.3 gigawatts of new generation reached financial close in 2025. We are not building anywhere near the speed that is required. Data centres bring new opportunities and new community concerns.
Australia has a competitive advantage in our ability to house them with our abundance of land and our relative ease with which our continent can harness renewable energy. From a sovereignty point of view, from an economic point of view, I believe that we should take advantage of this opportunity to host these data centres. But we can only do that in a way that builds social licence and where we can build that quickly and efficiently, and that's where community benefit comes in.
Social licence is not a nicety. Its absence is not just bad for communities. It makes decisions less predictable and investment more uncertain.
Merit appeals routines add more than a year to a project, with real costs in contract negotiations and financing and option costs, and those costs fall on all of us. The Productivity Commission found faster approvals reduce emissions, reduce costs for developers, attract investment and make energy cheaper, all supporting productivity growth. Accelerating wind farms and accompanying transmission by a single year could reduce electricity prices by seven per cent over the decade—seven per cent.
That is the price of the fights we do not need to have. So this is why this motion is so important. We need to manage this energy transition, we need to build abundant energy in this country, and we need to do that with the support of the communities that are hosting this.
I come from the city. Many, in political terms, would say, 'Well, why do you care about this?' I care about this because the regional communities are hosting energy infrastructure that benefits me and my community, and I think it is fair that those communities that are hosting that get community benefit too. There are those in the parliament and across the country who seek to divide the city and the country.
That is wrong and unnecessary, because if it's not fair to the communities in regional Australia then it's not going to be fair for this country either. So this is why all parliamentarians should be getting behind community benefit for this infrastructure in a way that gives better predictability and better speed of development and can actually accelerate this energy transition in a way that benefits communities.