COMMITTEES
Senator BELL (New South Wales—One Nation Whip) (17:32): Under the Albanese Labor government, productive Australian agriculture is being destroyed in pursuit of its net zero obsession. Rushy Lagoon should be a warning to every Australian. Tasmania's largest farm is being turned into another monument to Labor's obsession with economic vandalism.
This is productive agricultural land. It grows food. It supports farmers and regional business.
Now taxpayers are helping finance its purchase by a foreign-backed investment structure, and taxpayers are even paying for the trees that will take thousands of hectares out of agricultural production. The Clean Energy Finance Corporation has put $69 million behind the purchase, and the Commonwealth handed over another $8.8 million towards establishing the plantation.
Think about the madness of that. Australians are being made to help buy Tasmania's largest farm and they're being made to pay for the pine trees that will destroy the agricultural value of thousands of hectares of it, all so carbon can be counted, traded and turned into credits. We are literally subsidising the conversion of productive farmland into a carbon credit plantation, and the government expected Tasmanian farmers to have to compete with that.
If Canberra was prepared to put $69 million behind Rushy Lagoon, why could they not be prepared to use that money to help Tasmanian farmers buy the property and keep it productive? Now, both federal Labor and the Tasmanian Liberals tell us they want to grow agriculture and train young people in agribusiness. Well, here they had an opportunity.
Tasmania's largest farm came onto the market. They could have helped local farmers buy it, improve it and keep it productive. They could have backed irrigation, livestock technology and training.
Instead, taxpayers are backing pine trees, carbon credits and a foreign-backed investment fund. Tasmanians have every right to feel sold out. The hastily rushed sale of Rushy Lagoon exposes something much bigger: carbon credits are changing what productive land is worth and how investors behave.
If you create perverse investment incentives, you're going to get perverse outcomes. A farm can now be valued not only for the food it produces but for the carbon someone else can claim by planting poisonous trees on. The Albanese Labor government are creating this lunacy and financing it—again, with your money.
They're taking your money and they're using it to destroy productive agricultural land. The consequences are obvious. With millions of dollars in taxpayer backing, productive farmland is now worth more to carbon investors than it is to a farmer who wants to keep producing food.
That means agricultural land gets taken out of production with fewer opportunities for local farmers to expand and a direct threat to the future of farming communities so important to our nation's history, our nation's future. Our farmland is being destroyed. Rushy Lagoon shows exactly how that distortion works, but Labor is boasting about a $140 million economic return.
We're not looking at the fine print on the jobs they create. These jobs are claimed over the lifetime of the project. They're not saying they'll create 190 permanent jobs from day one.
Once again, they're being a little bit fudgy with the maths here. Meanwhile, productive agriculture supports an economy year after year—farmers, contractors, transport operators, vets, machinery businesses and local suppliers. Labor gives Tasmanians the big headline number, but the fine print tells a much different story, a much smaller story.
And this is where Rushy Lagoon becomes part of a much bigger national argument. The Albanese Labor government have locked Australians into net zero and they're spending an extraordinary amount of public money trying to force the country to go along with it, trying to force the country into meeting arbitrary targets. They call it a transition, but a lot of people refer to it as a managed decline.
Many Australians call it a massive government direct transfer of money into projects that fit Labor's net zero agenda. Just look at the Capacity Investment Scheme. The Capacity Investment Scheme is what is underwriting these renewable projects.
Rewiring the Nation commits billions to transmission, so-called green hydrogen gets its subsidies, and batteries are getting their subsidies. The Clean Energy Finance Corporation pours public capital into projects that fit the government's net zero agenda. Labor calls this investment, but Australians should remember whose money is being invested and who is carrying the risk, because ultimately this is your money that's being invested, and you're carrying the risk.
If these projects fail, we're bearing the consequences. The Albanese government are spending like a drunken sailor to achieve net zero at any cost, except drunken sailors eventually run out of their own money. Labor have got a supply of yours that will last them quite some time until it runs out.
But there is not an infinite supply of taxpayer money, despite how Labor are spending it. Now, if anyone wants to see how absurd this has become, just look at Tomago Aluminium. Tomago is Australia's largest aluminium smelter and one of the biggest electricity users in the country.
It was built in New South Wales because this state once had abundant, reliable and affordable coal fired electricity. Now that smelter's future has been put at risk by the cost of power. So what's Labor's answer?
They're forced into another taxpayer rescue. The Albanese and Minns Labor governments have announced a $2½ billion package to keep Tomago operating beyond 2028. Senator Ayres: That's so dishonest; you're so dishonest.
Why do you hate jobs? Senator BELL: Have you got a point of order there? The DEPUTY PRESIDENT: Senator Ayres?
Senator Bell, you have the call. Senator BELL: I'm glad Senator Ayres is paying attention to this speech. He's paying a little bit more attention than the minister was paying to our press release on keeping Australians safe.
It's good to see you paying attention. You are switching off now! We've got a Labor government breaking the energy system.
Then who do they call when they've done this, when they've driven up electricity prices so high that once-profitable manufacturing businesses can no longer compete? Who do they call in? They're forced to go back to the taxpayer because the net zero obsession that they have has meant, for these once-profitable industries that provided jobs and security to the people of our country, to the people of the Hunter and to the people of New South Wales, they've destroyed them.
We know that Tomago needs huge amounts of reliable electricity 24 hours a day. You cannot tell an aluminium smelter to wait until the wind picks up. You cannot shut the pots down when solar generation disappears.
You need dependable power. After years of closing the reliable generation and forcing the system towards intermittent renewables, Labor is now spending billions to compensate a major industrial user for the cost of that policy. For that sort of money, Australia should be asking how much permanent, reliable energy generation we could have built instead.
One Nation has been pointing this out. We've been calling on the government to invest in coal-fired power stations. But they've let the ones that we have fall apart.
They've abandoned them. In doing so, they've abandoned the reliable, affordable, effective energy generation that powered things like Tomago. Now they're asking the taxpayer to power Tomago.
There's no way to infinitely bail our way out. The promises they make about intermittent power are simply not true. Windmills and industrial-scale solar blanketing agricultural land is not the solution.
Then they won't even consider things like nuclear. That's all because anything down that path destroys their argument, destroys their vehicle towards the targets that they have legislated and set for their net zero obsession. How many more industries could we have if we had even more coal fired power, if we had even more reliable generation?
They're bailing out Tomago, but think about how much more we could have if we had even more coal fired power. The opportunity cost that we have witnessed and the amount of loss and decline we have seen from Labor's failure to secure reliable dispatchable power in favour of intermittency boggles the mind. That is Labor's net zero economics.
Labor's obsession with making energy expensive is what's putting Australia's industry in danger. Senator Ayres: You're a mind-boggling unit—that's what you are! The DEPUTY PRESIDENT: Order, Senator Ayres!
Senator BELL: It appears that the Labor government does not want the people of Australia to hear what I have to say, but I'm going to say it anyway. Tomago and Rushy Lagoon look like different stories. They are not.
They are both examples of governments using enormous amounts of public money to force economic activity to fit their chosen political target. At Rushy Lagoon, taxpayers helped a carbon investor beat agriculture. Tomago taxpayers are asked to rescue industry from the price of energy.
They're asked to rescue industry from Labor—the same government that tells Australians the transition is delivering cheap power and stronger industry. They're the ones who have driven Tomago to the brink of bankruptcy. They're the ones that Australian jobs now have to be rescued from.
They've lit the house on fire. They're spraying a bit of water on it and asking for a thankyou. You can't make this up.
Much of this spending is also dressed up so it does not look like ordinary spending. Loans are called 'investments'. Risk is shifted onto public balance sheets.
Guarantees are treated as if they're free. But there is no magic government money. There is taxpayer money, borrowed money and taxpayer risk.
If these projects are as cheap and commercially irresistible as Labor claims, then why do they need so much taxpayer help? Why does this government have to underwrite them? Why are consequential loans required?
Why does Canberra keep inventing new schemes to make their failed economics work? Australians are paying more for electricity while being told that the technology driving the transition is cheaper. Families do not care what a government model says electricity should cost.
They care what appears on their ever-growing bills. Manufacturers care about whether they can keep operating. Businesses care about whether they can stay competitive.
Tomago cares about whether it can get reliable electricity at a price that keeps the smelter open. Under Labor, they couldn't. That is the future that Labor created.
That is the path that we are facing—a future where our manufacturing, our industries, our farms cannot stand on their own two feet. They don't have the power to run. The market has been perverted, and we see these outcomes which are so detrimental to our future productivity and the jobs in our regions.
Then we get to the issue of the environment. The environmental hypocrisy is just extraordinary. Labor and the Greens lecture Australians—I'll give you a shout-out there, Senator McKim—about protecting nature whilst supporting the industrialisation of huge areas of regional Australia.
Transmission corridors cut across farmland. Wind and solar disturb land and habitat. Roads, substations and other infrastructures have to be built.
Apparently, environmental damage stops being environmental damage when it helps Chris Bowen meet a target. Regional Australians are the ones who are expected to wear it. The towers are not being built through inner-city streets.
Large renewable intermittent developments are not being concentrated beside people writing the policies. It's regional communities who are forced to bear the brunt of the infrastructure that is forced upon them by this Albanese Labor government's net zero obsession—and Rushy Lagoon fits perfectly into that pattern. A productive farm becomes an opportunity to store up carbon.
Taxpayer money is making it happen, and the people who are told this is all for their benefit are expected to applaud when it's their jobs being wiped out and their communities being destroyed. Other countries are already discovering that political climate promises eventually collide with economic reality. Canada scrapped its consumer carbon price.
The European governments are reworking their climate policies because of competitiveness, industrial pressure and household costs. Eventually, the bill arrives. For many Australians, the bill is already here—and they are finding it very difficult to pay.
Australia needs to learn that lesson. Instead, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Chris Bowen keep treating net zero as the organising principle of energy policy. In One Nation, we believe this is a fundamental mistake.
That is why One Nation would scrap the net zero obsession. We would stop treating taxpayers as an unlimited source of risk capital for the politically favoured projects that Labor choose. We would not allow carbon credit schemes to distort the value of productive agricultural land.
We would put reliability and affordability back at the centre of energy policy. We would stop pretending, like Labor does, that destroying productive capacity can somehow be called progress simply because someone's attached the word 'green' to it. That brings us back to Rushy Lagoon, Tasmania's largest farm—productive agricultural land destroyed by Labor.
Tasmanians are the ones paying for it. (Time expired) The PRESIDENT: The question is that the motion as moved by Senator Colbeck be agreed to.