ADDRESS TO PARLIAMENT - PRIVATE MEMBERS' BUSINESS - Energy

I very much take pleasure in speaking on this motion brought to the parliament by the member for Gippsland, who is unwell, as we've heard. He will be back tomorrow; don't worry. But it is with great pleasure that I follow the members for O'Connor, Durack and Casey on the coalition side, arguing about the merits of gas. There were some parts of the member for Moreton's contribution that I very much agreed with, but he ought to know that, under those nine years of the coalition government, one in four homes had rooftop solar. That was the highest take-up in the world of rooftop solar. Electricity bills were actually down. We made gas affordable. We made power achievable. Indeed, the price of gas is up 22.2 per cent under Labor. That is simply not good enough from a government which purports to put in place a made-in-Australia manufacturing policy. Industry requires gas and is going to need gas in large volumes to make sure that we do have 'a future made in Australia'. Households are going to require more and more gas because, when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow and the batteries do not have sufficient capacity to store the power, then something has got to give, and we can't have our grid collapsing and failing at a time of importance.

Legislation passed in this place just last December meant that unconventional gas production, including from the Northern Territory's Beetaloo basin, a vital source of gas, was going to require new approvals from the Commonwealth after the government brought forward its plans to expand the so-called water trigger. Of course, once this came up, the Greens couldn't wait to get out and take credit for it. But the expanded trigger was very much opposed by the mining industry, which was very nervous and very worried about what the government was proposing and bringing forward. Samantha McCulloch from industry group Australian Energy Producers said that the updated water trigger legislation would create 'unnecessary duplication' and added that it would offer 'another barrier to unlocking gas supply'. She said:

Changes passed by the Senate last night pre-empted proper process and consultation under the ongoing reform of the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act.

We know that power bills have increased by $1,000 more than what the Albanese government promised. We know that 90 per cent of baseload electricity—predominantly coal-fired power stations—is coming to the end of life over the next decade. We know that gas is going to fill a large part of that shortfall, or should do. I invite the member for Moreton to pick up the phone to some of his Victorian Labor colleagues, because they want gas taken out of the network holus-bolus.

Australians are currently paying some of the most expensive electricity prices in the world, up 56c per kilowatt hour. The government's target of 82 per cent renewables by 2030 requires 4.5 gigawatts of additional large-scale wind and solar every year. Last year, less than one-third of this was delivered. All politics is local. In my local area, at the Wagga Wagga City Council in May this year the Greens councillor Jenny McKinnon had a bit of a try-on. We know there are local government elections this September. She put a motion to phase out the use of gas in the city. The Wagga Wagga distribution network is a gas distribution pipeline located in southern New South Wales, of course. The pipeline is owned by Australian Gas Networks and approximately 690 kilometres in length. It's a big system. But, interestingly, Councillor McKinnon's motion lapsed due to a lack of a seconder, and that was the appropriate and right way for it to go.

We need more gas in the system. The Western Australians got it right when they put a gas reserve in place. We need to be sure that we have gas for exports and gas for domestic supply. If we're going to have a future made in Australia, then we need more gas, and the government needs to address this.