<Deputy> Speaker, this set of Appropriation Bills seeks appropriations for a combined $12.1 billion across two Bills.

We on this side of the House care greatly about how taxpayers’ money is spent, and an incoming Dutton-Littleproud Government will have the nation’s first Minister for Government Efficiency in the form of Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price alongside future Assistant Minister for Government Waste Reduction, James Stevens.  I cannot wait to see them run the rule over every agency and find efficiencies.

We know that under the Albanese Government cost of living has increased substantially, and real wages are not keeping up.  The Coalition is committed to fighting tooth and nail for everyday Australians to find savings everywhere we can.

On that front I focus today on energy policy, because this is a government that 97 times promised before they were elected that they would reduce power bills permanently by $275 per annum.  That promise was officially broken on 1 January this year.   They hate us talking about it Mr Speaker, it was a big promise, it was a bold promise, and it is broken.  

Why is this promise broken?  Is it because this Government couldn’t deliver an outcome even if it was gift-wrapped on their doorstep?  Yes, that’s part of it.

Is it broken because this is an incompetent Government, unready for office and showing no sign of improvement?

Yes, that too.

The promise to reduce energy bills is also broken because Labor are joined at the hip to the Australian Greens political party.  Labor didn’t run in the Prahran by-election for some bizarre reason, but in the seats Labor does hold, they fret about losing them to the Greens.  So Labor rob regions to buy votes in the inner cities, throwing country people under the figurative bus to save themselves from the Greens.  

Labor thinks that a rapid race to a political  carbon emissions reduction target, is the smart thing to do. It is not.  

The Albanese Labor Government is turning Australia into an international pariah.  No nation of the geographic scale like Australia, with the tiny emissions profile like Australia, is doing what this blind government is doing with 28,000 kilometres of transmission lines across agricultural electorates like mine with VNI-West.  

Almost every other developed nation is turning to zero-emissions nuclear energy for the long term.  The Coalition has a responsible plan for energy policy, and when I look at:

the almost $179 million in this bill for the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and water,  

the $263 million plus for the Department of Industry, Science and Resources, and  

the $33 million for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry,  

…. I wonder for that collective taxpayer spending of in excess of $575 million how nobody has piped up and said – what about nuclear?  What about looking and learning from the rest of the world?  What about our farmers and fishers and the impact reckless energy policy is having on them?

<Deputy Speaker> either those agencies are incompetent, or this is a government so blind to its political and ideological energy target that it simply won’t listen to sound advice.  

Worse than the direct taxpayer impact of the government spending in this bill – spending on agencies that are either incompetent or ignored by the government anyway - there are hidden costs to every taxpayer in the consequences of collective energy policy failures at state and federal levels.  In my home state of Victoria we have a State and Federal Labor government who are zeroing in on my electorate of Mallee as Labor’s dumping ground for bad policy, namely, railroading small regional communities and farmers with unwanted wind turbine, solar panel and transmission line projects.  

Don’t buy the spin from foreign wind cowboy companies – over 90 per cent of over 1,800 people who own, work or have a close connection with farms oppose renewable projects on farmland, according to a recent survey by farming advocacy group Farms for Food.  

Victorian Labor had six renewable energy zones in their initial plans, now almost all the singular REZ is landing in Mallee.

While Australians struggle with the cost of living and 27,000 small businesses have gone to the wall under Labor - with energy costs a major factor in falling business viability - Labor pretends its $275 permanent energy reduction promise never happened.  The arsonists stand there with a bucket of water pretending they’re helping.  They toss into the energy prices bonfire a one-off series of four quarterly payments to somehow nurse their wounded polling through an election.  Mark my words, no sooner will the election pass and power bills will surge back up again.    

This Government cares far, far more about its own political survival in inner city electorates than it does about struggling Australians and battling small businesses.

Labor is dividing the Mallee with duplicated infrastructure that we will not need if we put zero emissions nuclear energy at existing coal-fired power plant sites.  

Labor forgets that during the early decades of this century energy bill payers already paid a fortune to gold-plate our transmission network.  Governments set reliability standards that were high in order to meet peak demand events which might only occur a few times a year, namely those couple of hot weeks we’ve just endured recently, when everyone is home in the evening and air conditioners are churning.   Into this mix they’ve thrown intermittent wind turbines which cannot guarantee peak generation when it is hot – it is incompetency at the nearly criminal level.

The same bureaucrats and boffins - in whom we are being asked to invest in this Bill today –back in the early 2000s projected that electricity demand would keep rising.  What they didn’t foresee was that energy efficiency improved and the takeup of rooftop solar panels.  

The gold-plating of the grid [based on false prophecies] saw us all pay early this century for new substations and transformer upgrades, more transmission and distribution lines, investments in network reliability and redundancy and capacity for peak demand that was rarely used.  

In Australian energy policy today we also see another clear illustration of the need to revisit where we stand as a federation when it comes to responsibility.  Energy policy is nobody’s direct responsibility, just like health policy as I find all the time as Shadow Assistant Minister for Regional Health.  The national energy arrangements like the Australian Energy Regulator and the Australian Energy Market Operator are set up under national, not federal arrangements.  Australian energy policy is an accountability vacuum and we all pay as a result.

The former Coalition Government intervened in this accountability vacuum by creating what is now known as the Australian Energy Infrastructure Commissioner. The first Commissioner was Andrew Dyer. Andrew retired relatively recently from the role and let me put on record my appreciation for Andrew’s work.  I connected with Andrew and in turn connected him with Mallee farmers and landholders who were being railroaded by Labor governments and harassed by the foreign energy cowboys Labor had enticed into regional Australia, stirring bad blood in regional communities and families.  Andrew called out those cowboys and sought greater regulation of their behaviour.  This has not happened.

I recently met in Parliament House with the new Commissioner Tony Mahar and he has a big job on his hands.  

The unreliability of Labor’s energy plans is writ large when you look at the recent collapse of a wind turbine in Berrybank south of my electorate.  These foreign energy cowboys are proposing turbines as large as 280 metres high, which is just 17 metres short of the Eureka Tower in Melbourne.  Each turbine at 280 metres high would clock in at number 7 in the tallest structures in the nation, behind the Sydney and Q1 Towers, Australia 108 in Melbourne and three naval communication towers.    

But wait, it gets worse.

A German company is planning to build a turbine 364 metres high to the tip of its blades – if we had those in Australia, that would be the equal second highest building in the nation.

Out of sight, out of mind from those inner city electorates where Labor is competing against Green and Teal votes, under the shadow of the Eureka Tower and Sydney Tower, Labor proposes pin cushioning electorates like Mallee with massive turbines that, after the Berrybank turbine collapse and other recent safety incidents, you have to ask whether turbines are safe - or good for the environment, let alone the potentially devastating impact on agriculture our primary industry.  Labor is happy to transform Mallee into an industrial wasteland.

The Victorian government has removed their 2022 report which says, without offshore wind generation Labor will need up to 70 per cent of Victoria’s agricultural land for their renewable energy objectives.  Don’t worry, I kept a copy of the document.  With offshore wind in Victoria on the rocks, you can see the wind turbine map of electorates like Mallee rapidly turning into a pincushion.

Australians are feeling the pain of this reckless energy transition in their energy bills, and will continue to do so as the Coalition revealed late last year that Labor’s renewables-only plan will cost almost $600 billion, with the Coalition’s responsible energy transition 44 per cent cheaper, at $263 billion.

Moody’s late last week confirmed Labor’s energy plan could cost up to $230 billion over the next 10 years alone - and drive household electricity prices up another 25 per cent in that time. This is yet another independent warning that Chris Bowen’s renewables-only approach will continue to hurt Australians, forcing families and businesses to the wall.  

Chris Bowen promised wholesale prices of $51/MWh (per megawatt hour) in 2025, but the reality is Australians quarterly prices have been in excess of $100 per megawatt hour over the past year.

Energy policy failures are why regional Australians are urging their city cousins to desert the axis of Labor, the Greens and the Teals – who I must add are backed by the energy barons of Climate 200, the very enablers of this destruction not only of our regional landscapes and lifestyles but environments.

I can only hope the expenditure in this Bill might go towards departments and staff who will call out this nonsense on behalf of regional Australians, salt of the earth hard-working farmers like Glenden Watts, Ben Duxson, Tess Healy, Barry Batters, Gerald Feeny, Andrew Weidemann, and Ross Johns and too many more to mention from my electorate who didn’t choose this fight. It chose them, and they are fighting, I am fighting alongside them and I am grateful to Peta Credlin from Sky News for giving them a platform, and I look forward to hosting Peta and Shadow Minister Ted O’Brien in Mallee before the election to show all Australians the human face and cost of reckless energy policy and the alternatives at our fingertip.