Federation Chamber - BILLS - Electricity Infrastructure Legislation Amendment Bill 2025 - Second Reading

Deputy Speaker, as I rise to speak on the Electricity Infrastructure Legislation Amendment Bill 2025 and I reflect on where I am speaking – here in the Federation Chamber where the non-controversial business is usually conducted.  The Shadow Minister for Climate Change and Energy  earlier  challenged why this Bill is being sent to this Chamber, which was used for covert purposes earlier in this Parliamentary session in Labor’s hope that the media weren’t watching.  

There’s no Press Gallery here Deputy Speaker, but I can assure you the Australian public are watching this government very closely on energy policy.  

They are watching failure after failure from the Albanese Labor Government to deliver the $275 reduction in their power prices promised 97 times to help Mr Albanese get into the Lodge.  

Labor’s energy approach comes at five times the cost Australians were initially promised.

Australians are watching quarterly wholesale prices rise to a level – over $100 per megawatt hour - when Minister Bowen promised wholesale prices would be just $51 per megawatt hour.

Wholesale prices skyrocketed 83 per cent in the past year, with record highs in New South Wales and Queensland – so what was Labor’s 2022 pre-election energy modelling? Perhaps it was a complete and utter fantasy.  Perhaps they accepted their modelling from their cowboy mates in the foreign owned wind turbine industry, for goodness knows what benefit to everyday Australians.

So, we come to this Bill, and the Shadow Minister mentioned in the House, a protection racket – he asked, why is this government running a protection racket?  When you consider the majority, if not all, of the wind turbine proponents offshore or onshore are foreign-owned, you have to ask if the Albanese Government is acting in the national interest.  Why are foreign-owned energy companies acting like cowboys across Australia, dividing communities with sham consultations?  Why the haste to put this retrospective legislation through the Parliament in what may well be the dying days of the Albanese Labor Government?  

Labor still haven’t told us how much offshore wind will cost or how much it will cost on your power bills.  

Given their track record, either they don’t know or they don’t care, as long as their cowboy mates in the foreign owned wind turbine industry get to railroad regional communities.

You only need to look at their form not only in my electorate of Mallee, as I was saying earlier this sitting week on the Appropriation Bill, Victorian Labor’s fast-tracking of regulations to turn my electorate into a pincushion of wind turbine projects and a spider’s web of transmission lines on prime agricultural land.

And just on transmission lines, let me add there are people who have very interesting lives who listen to Parliament, who are listening right now. One took it upon themselves to write to me responding to my earlier speech this week saying nuclear energy will require transmission lines just like wind does.

No, that’s incorrect.

The Coalition’s policy is to establish nuclear energy facilities to support energy jobs at existing coal-fired power sites, in the existing transmission network.  

That’s the nonsense those opposite – and their ideological friends in the Greens and Climate-200 backed Teals – propagate in Australia.  They gaslight Australians that regional people want wind turbines.  When you actually ask regional people, farmers facing the imposition of wind turbines, their answer is a 90 per cent NO.  That is a fact.  Nuclear will not require the 28,000 kilometres of transmission lines across regional Australia that Labor is proposing.

This is a government waging an ideological war on coal and gas, offering damp squibs to coal and gas miners and workers, for instance proposing that coal-fired power workers in the Hunter Valley be re-employed making solar panels.  Never mind, in Labor’s la la land, where China already dominates that market and nobody in business would go anywhere near trying to take China on without serious subsidies.

Labor has weakened the energy grid and Australians are being forced to rely on expensive, unreliable renewables without the necessary firming power. Labor has no plan for affordability, no plan for reliability, and no plan to keep the lights on - and Aussie families are paying the price.

It’s time to embrace a balanced energy mix as a cheap, clean and consistent path forward.  

I surveyed of thousands of voters in my Mallee electorate and asked, do you support extracting more gas for use in Australia.  This is in Victoria, remember, where the Andrews and Allan Labor Governments cripple investment and exploration for gas.  Over two-thirds of Mallee voters, 68.6 per cent, said yes, they support extracting more gas for use in Australia.  Just 15.7 per cent said no.  

Incidentally, 46.5 per cent of respondents said Australia’s carbon emissions reduction targets are too high, and 62.5 per cent said they were likely to support nuclear power like small modular reactors being part of Australia’s future energy mix.  

When asked whether they thought our energy system should prioritise reducing emissions, ensuring electricity is affordable or ensuring reliable supply – 57 per cent backed affordability.  

The Australian people are not mugs, but Labor is trying to take the Australian public for mugs.  Australians see their power bills going up, they listen to the Energy Minister Chris Bowen saying renewables are the cheapest form of electricity and they laugh.  Not ha ha, that’s a funny gag laugh.  That nervous sort of laugh which would be funnier if it wasn’t so painful.  This government is a joke, but not the funny kind. The sick joke kind.  I can tell you Mallee voters can not wait to render their verdict at the ballot box.

It gets worse though, this vindictive brand of Labor we currently have at Federal and Victorian levels takes the insult one further – they determined that Mallee will be the primary Renewable Energy Zone for the state.  There were going to be six REZs, but three of them vanished.  Two others are in Mallee, and the other they will point the foreign owned wind turbine cowboys is Wannon.  But the big purple patch on Labor’s REZ map is in Mallee.  

Go bulldoze your way through Mallee, they tell the foreign owned wind turbine cowboys.  Pretend you care, but go your hardest.  Conduct a fig leaf consultation, but hey – we’ve got your back! – we’ll fast track the laws, we’ll have sham environmental approvals so you can get through.  

Why?

We know is the rush is for Labor’s political target - a hypothetical emissions reduction target that is hurting every Australian in their power bills.  A mad rush to a renewables future because Labor have thrown the dirt in the face of coal and gas, and said get out of our country.  Nick off, they say, we’ve got abundant wind and solar.

One problem - the wind doesn’t blow at the precise moment everyone has their air-conditioners on in the peak of summer, when the sun has gone down.  

Its very thoughtless of the sun and wind to do that, to not shine and blow when Labor wants it to for their supposedly green dreams.

I can picture the Minister, frustrated at the setting sun, asking it “How will renewables be the cheapest form of energy, if you keep going down all the time!”

It is like King Canute yelling at the tide.  A footnote of history, Deputy Speaker, King Canute was actually trying to demonstrate that his power had limits, that nature - or God in his context - had a supremacy he could not counteract.

But not the Albanese Government. Not the Energy Minister.  They’ll yell that renewables are the cheapest form of electricity because if they say it enough, they hope the lie will become the truth.  

Before I finish Deputy Speaker I want to commend my colleague the Member for Nicholls for moving a Bill, the Requiring Energy Infrastructure Providers to Obtain Rehabilitation Bonds Bill 2024.  The premise of the Bill is a simple one, and I have mentioned these energy cowboys, the foreign owned companies that come and build projects but:  who knows if they will still be around to clean up the mess if they’ve gone broke and these huge turbines are still there, rusting away?

Let’s remember, Deputy Speaker, turbines proposed onshore in my electorate are at this stage potentially up to 280 metres high, 17 metres short of the Eureka Tower in Melbourne, one of Australia’s tallest buildings.  As I said earlier this week in the House, there’s a turbine over 350 metres high proposed in Germany which – if built here in Australia – would make it one of the nation’s tallest buildings.  These energy cowboys, foreign-owned companies want to put massive turbines offshore.  

It seems to me the Member for Nicholls’ bill – and I disclose an interest, a very passionate and strong interest in the genesis of that Bill – is a perfectly reasonable proposition.

If you’re putting gigantic infrastructure on Australian shores, you need to put down the money to show you’ll rehabilitate when it’s finished.  Nobody has a crystal ball and it is fanciful to suggest that in decades or centuries to come wind turbines will be a permanent fixture on our oceans, mountains and landscapes.  They will become redundant and they will need to be removed.

Requiring a rehabilitation bond is surely environmentally responsible.  The political children on the crossbench, principally the Greens, like to hop up and down and demand miners rehabilitate the land if mines go ahead.  We have state laws that require that rehabilitation – it is the law of the land.

Yet somehow, if it is an energy project, if its wind turbines – No!  - the Greens go missing! Don’t impose environmental rehabilitation requirements on wind projects!  God forbid!

As one older lady said at a public meeting I attended at Warracknabeal in my electorate (admitting she’s not a very good shot) but if a farmer shot an eagle, they’d be prosecuted.  Yet somehow if a wind turbine chops one up, that’s good for the environment.

And let’s not forget that popular Counting Crows song - often wistfully sung by the would-be environmentalists - bemoaning that “they paved paradise and put up a parking lot”.  

Well, in my electorate of Mallee, they’re wrecking paradise and building a very large pincushion.  A pincushion of wind turbines to punish Mallee voters for having the common sense to see Labor’s energy pipedream for what it is.  Labor are punishing the sensible Australians who yell to the emperor that he isn’t wearing any clothes and throwing them in the political clink.  

That’s the nasty, vindictive behaviour by Labor in Mallee.  Labor intends to punish regional Australians for supporting a sensible approach to energy policy, all so Labor can keep living their out-of-sight, out-of-mind wind turbine fantasies in the inner cities.  

I commend Peta Credlin from Sky News and the Weekly Times for sharing my constituents’ stories.  Come out and take a look at the industrial wasteland Labor is creating on our paradise, our Grampians and Wimmera plains and Gannawarra wetlands.

Australian voters can not wait for this election, Deputy Speaker, and neither can I. Bring it on!