ADDRESS TO PARLIAMENT- Future Made in Australia (Guarantee of Origin) Bill 2024
Mr McCORMACK (Riverina) (11:11): News outlets are presently reporting power outages impacting thousands of residents in Wagga Wagga. And it's not just at that large inland city in southern New South Wales; it is also Henty, Holbrook, Rand, Culcairn, south of the largest inland city in the state. Thousands of houses in Wagga Wagga are without power as the oppressive heat wave continues to grip parts of New South Wales: that's what the media reports are suggesting. Reports of a blackout were first recorded at about 5.30 am on Wednesday, today, affecting more than 6,000 customers. They are Essential Energy customers.
The fact is at the moment in Wagga Wagga it is 21 Celsius. The fact is there hasn't been a heatwave, as suggested by the media outlets. The fact is it is the second power outage that the city has experienced just in recent weeks. We had a storm go through there several days ago and knock the power out for many of the homes and many of the businesses—not anywhere near half the homes or businesses, I might add, but many thousands of people were affected.
This is the thin edge of the wedge. If you can have a storm but not a huge storm, if you can have hotter weather but not a heatwave affecting power like this, then what is going to happen when we have a real storm or, indeed, when the weather reaches temperatures, as it normally does in Wagga Wagga, of the old 100 Fahrenheit, the old century mark of 38 degrees Celsius? That will come in summer, in December, January through February. That's how hot it gets in Wagga Wagga.
I remember some years ago suggesting that nobody will really worry too much about blackouts. And we'd had some dreadful blackouts in Adelaide, with thousands upon thousands of South Australia's affected. I said, 'Well, people won't really get all that worried until one of the day-nighters at one of the major cricket grounds is cast into pitch blackness,' and I was mocked. I was derided by the media. And do you know what? It was only a week or so later when that's exactly what happened.
Heaven help us if we do have to power shed this summer, as we will, and Tomago, our largest electricity user, is forced to shut down, forcing people off duty. It is a real worry. If you can't have reasonable, cost-effective power, how on earth are you going to have a future made in Australia manufacturing? I'm all for making things in Australia and ensuring we have manufacturing jobs and factories producing things in Australia, but there is so much folly about this bill. The purpose of this package of three bills is to initiate a guarantee of origin scheme to track and verify emissions connected with products made in Australia. Further, it provides a mechanism for renewable electricity certification. That should send a shiver down many people's spines. The framework of the Guarantee of Origin scheme aims to 'transparently'—note that I say that word rather facetiously—determine where a product came from, how it was made and what its total emissions were. It will initially cover hydrogen and renewable electricity but will expand over time to cover other products.
The bills will also establish the renewable electricity Guarantee of Origin certification mechanism, to acknowledge the renewable energy component of the electricity used in a production process. I don't know about others, but I think we're treading into very dangerous territory, and I'll tell you why. These bills fail to be technology agnostic, and everything that we've said and done as a coalition when it comes to energy has included the word 'balance'. We've always said that we need to have a correct and proper balance. Renewables are fine, but this rush to renewables by the Labor government puts at risk jobs, costs and, indeed, our ability to produce things—to make things in Australia. It puts at risk our farmers. It puts at risk our ability to grow food and fibre.
The bills also show bias against hydro in favour of wind and solar. The Snowy hydroelectricity scheme, which is in the Snowy Valleys—soon to be incorporated again into the Riverina electorate—was built, to begin with, to be not only a hydroelectricity scheme but also an irrigation scheme for the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area and, later on, for the Coleambally Irrigation Area, which utilised that life-giving product called water that Samuel McCaughey pioneered for that particular region in the late 19th century.
When John Oxley the explorer went through the area now known as the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area, that Garden of Eden, he described it as land that no-one would ever want to inhabit. It was a veritable desert, and he described it thus. What those irrigation pioneers did—the likes of Sir Samuel and those World War I veterans who were sent there and given a small plot—was turn that desert into a food-producing area. Now we have a government that wants to not only bring in bills such as this but also buy all the productive water out of the system, such that our farmers—some of them debt stressed—have a distorted water market. And once that water goes out of the valley, it very rarely comes back. At the behest of the Greens, who hold Labor by the nose and pull them along, all that productive water is sent out of the mouth of the Murray and out to sea and, thence, it can't be used.
If we're going to have a future made in Australia, the first thing we should be growing is food, not just for our people but for many other nations besides. Our food is the best. Our food is the cleanest. Our food is the greenest. I could have replaced the word 'food' with 'farmers' in every one of those sentences, because our farmers are the best stewards of the environment in the world and they do grow the best, the freshest, the cleanest and the greenest food, and whether that's at Shepparton or in the fine state of Tasmania, or in Queensland or New South Wales, right across this nation our farmers are champions. These bills don't align with the efforts that our farmers go to to produce that food—a future made in Australia.
Speaking of alignment, these bills also do not align with overseas schemes. Whilst alignment with international geoschemes has been a recognised priority of industry, apparently, the preclusion of technologies such as blue hydrogen using gas with carbon capture and storage puts Australia's scheme at odds with similar schemes being established in the European Union and the United Kingdom.
But do you think Labor cares? Do you think Labor worries about those concerns that I and others have with these bills?
It's also a great risk for Australia, putting a trojan horse for a broader, economy-wide, carbon price. We all remember what happened when, in late 2010, the then Prime Minister said, 'There will be no carbon price,' or carbon tax, 'under a government I lead,' and that was perhaps right then. But then of course we had Bob Brown as the Greens leader—and I will say one thing about Bob Brown: he was an environmentalist, first and foremost and probably only. These days, the member for Melbourne and the member for Griffith and all the other Greens cabal from that Greens political party are not environmentalists. They want to just change society for the worse. They want to tear down traditions. They want to strip away all the things that have made this country great—but I digress.
Then Prime Minister Gillard held a press conference, in that unholy Greens-Labor alliance, and placed a price on carbon. And we know what happened after that.
That said, what we see here is a scheme intended to initially cover hydrogen. The government's plan will expand it over time, and the devil will be in that detail. That's what you have to worry about, because it's not what is in the bill per se, as it stands now; it's what a future Labor government, and a Greens-teals-crossbench—and who knows what parties they'll gather together if need be—will do in the future.
It bears little resemblance to the policy of the former coalition government. The coalition's approach was technology-agnostic. The coalition's approach was balanced. The coalition's approach was practical and sensible. It understood and took on board what stakeholders said or suggested should happen.
We do need a future made in Australia, and I'm not so blind as to say that we shouldn't take on board green energy suggestions. I met with Helen Philippidis, the Manager of Corporate Affairs at the Australian Gas Infrastructure Group, just on Monday. This group is one of the largest infrastructure businesses in Australia, with assets valued at more than $9½ billion. They're suggesting a considerable project in the industrial hub at Wagga Wagga, and, by the looks of it, this project will provide a 10-megawatt hydrogen electrolyser that will blend up to 10 per cent renewable hydrogen into the local network. We have to look at these things, seriously, and we have to take them on board for the effort and the investment that are being put in. I know that the project is also intended to work in conjunction with an anaerobic digester to be built. I know what they're doing just outside Parkes, with converting waste into energy. These are good and sensible ideas. The project at Parkes is taking on board what they're doing at Kwinana as well, over in the west. These are good and sensible projects, and people are happy to back them. But this particular bill and this package of bills are not good.
What also worries me is that so many of the energy projects in and around my area, these huge solar farms, are taking up valuable prime agricultural land. You've only got a certain amount of farmland, and, once it's taken, it's decades before you potentially get it back, and then who knows what leaching will be in the soil anyway? But what happens is that they're considered significant state priority projects, and the New South Wales government comes in and just rides roughshod over local people—local residents, local ratepayers and local councils, be they shire or city councils. In either case, they are people elected by locals to do the job for them. They don't get a say, because the state government says, 'Oh, no, this is a state significant project.' Some of the projects are as small as $5 million, yet, because they're considered state significant, Macquarie Street just rides roughshod over the local council and over local people. It's just not right. It's just undemocratic. We live in Australia in 2024. We should be far better than that.
Yes, we do need a future made in Australia. We do need the factories and the farms to be operating as efficiently and as smoothly as possible. We don't need them to have to continue to pay huge power bills. What is happening at Wagga Wagga and elsewhere in southern New South Wales today, with the tripping, the outages and the power blackouts, is just, as I said, the thin end of the wedge. I hate to think what's going to happen during the rest of the summer if a small electrical storm or a little bit of hot weather can knock out the power like that.