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Does it feel like inflation is going down to you?
The government claims it’s winning the battle, yet out in the real world everything is still getting more expensive and nothing is anywhere close to the price it was 5 years ago.
You’re not crazy – the government’s just trying to gaslight you and tell you things are better than they are heading into an election. Only One Nation would make the real changes to put more money back in your pocket.
Transcript
One Nation supports this matter of urgency. During 2024 alone the living cost index for wage and salary earners rose four per cent, down from a high of six per cent earlier in the year. The reduction has been caused, in large part, through electricity subsidies. The government is paying your bill for you! The underlying inflation rate is still there, ready to reappear after the next election, when the government stops paying those subsidies.
Rising electricity prices for business are not being subsidised, increasing prices in supermarkets, retail, wholesale and manufacturing. The public see the price rises and don’t realise they are, in large part, the result of net zero measures, which One Nation will bring to an end, reducing power bills by 20 per cent immediately, and by much more over forward estimates.
Alcohol and tobacco costs rose due to the five per cent excise indexation and a cash grab the government calls AWOTE, where the more workers earn, the more the government increases the excise. One Nation will freeze all excise increases for three years. Watch for further announcements on this subject.
Insurance and financial services costs rose 13 per cent due to higher premiums for house, home contents and motor vehicle insurance. Insurance companies are becoming increasingly concentrated. Queensland’s Suncorp owns AAMI, GIO, Bingle and Shannons among others. Over the last five years Suncorp’s cash earnings rose from $59 to $108, and their share price rose from $9 to $17. One Nation will fund the ACCC, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, to ensure insurance companies are not ripping off consumers, including using fraudulent flood and bushfire maps to hike premiums. One Nation will remove the GST on insurance premiums.
Finally, the fall in inflation coming from a small reduction in the petrol price is significant. It proves One Nation’s policy to cut fuel excise by 26c per litre, and our other measures, will reduce inflation to make room for an interest rate cut. One Nation means more money in your pocket.
The claim that solar and wind energy are cheaper because the wind and sun are free is not supoprted by the evidence. In reality, adding more solar and wind to the grid increases electricity costs. The reason is straightforward: while the wind and sun are free, the infrastructure—wind turbines, solar panels, backup batteries, 15,000 kilometers of extra transmission lines, and access roads—is very expensive to produce, transport, install, and maintain.
Unlike modern coal or nuclear power plants that last 60 years, solar panels, wind turbines and backup batteries only last 15 years. The $1.9 trillion investment will only get us to 2050. After that, every 15 years, solar and wind infrastructure will need to be replaced at a cost of hundreds of billions more. This madness must end!
One Nation will abolish the federal department of climate change along with all related agencies and programs, including net zero measures and mandates. This will return $30 billion a year to the Treasury, contributing to One Nation’s pledge to reduce $80 billion plus in government spending in our first term. More importantly, it will put billions of dollars back into the pockets of Australians and businesses, making everything more affordable. That’s how we solve the cost-of-living crisis.
It’s time to end the net zero scam. One Nation will make it happen.
Transcript
For the last 30 years Australia has been hostage to the supposedly green movement’s great climate fraud, designed to create an all-purpose excuse to do whatever the government wants—an excuse that’s reusable, recyclable and fungible, not only for the government’s benefit but for the benefit of their donors, stakeholders, bureaucrats and associated carpetbaggers, such as Bill Gates and BlackRock’s Larry Fink. We know who these people are from watching the meetings Prime Minister Albanese has and refuses to explain. Nothing says, ‘I’m doing dodgy deals behind the Australian people’s back,’ like refusing to publish detailed records of what was said and agreed in these meetings. This evening I’ll examine the green climate fraud and make a major One Nation policy announcement.
Let’s start with the war on farming. The climate scam seeks to replace fresh, healthy, field-grown Australian produce from family farms with fake foods in near-urban intensive production facilities—synthetic meat-like products cultured in bioreactors in a process that mimics the way cancer cells grow, with just enough artificial nutrients added to pass as food. Fake meat from plants remains on life support, with 18 ingredients, now including cocoa, and they still can’t make people eat it. Billionaires can’t make money out of conventional farming; they can make money, they think, out of industrial food. Who owns vegetarian meat supplier Beyond Meat? Surprise, surprise: predatory global wealth funds BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street lead their share registry.
Both the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California Davis have found the environmental footprint of these Frankenfoods is worse than that of naturally grown pasture raised beef. Bill Gates has declared cattle an existential threat because of their methane farts. Rubbish. Cattle have been on this earth for two million years. Leading methane producer India domesticated cattle 9,000 years ago, and nothing has changed. Another leading methane producer, the United States, had bison for 150,000 years. Three hundred years ago, there were 50 million bison, or buffalo. Now they’re gone, the USA’s 28 million cows are suddenly causing ‘fartageddon’.
There’s no science to justify this nonsense. As the University of California Davis explains:
After about 12 years, the methane—
from cattle—
is converted into carbon dioxide through hydroxyl oxidation. That carbon is the same carbon that was in the air prior to being consumed by an animal. It is recycled carbon.
Cows don’t harm the environment. The methane cycle they perpetuate has been with us for two million years, at times in greater quantities than now.
Plants are more powerful than scientists admit. A recent finding from the US government’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory found:
Scientists Were Wrong: Plants Absorb 31% More CO2 Than Previously Thought.
Climate scammers refuse to talk about the role of forests and crops, especially hemp, in sequestering carbon. Australia is already carbon neutral. Our forests and crops sequester much more carbon than Australia produces. So let’s stop chopping down trees for industrial wind and solar assess roads and transmission lines, and we can stay that way.
The next lie is that global boiling will kill us. Fact check: it’s false. Between 1998 and 2023, global temperature variation osculated between minus 0.4 degrees and 0.6 degrees as carbon dioxide, CO2, levels in the air rose from 0.036 per cent to 0.042 per cent. Then the Tonga eruption occurred, and temperatures rose by 0.7 degrees centigrade more. I’ll share a link on this topic when I post this speech on my website. It includes some excellent gifs of the fraudulent data tampering and fake temperature stations that have concocted warming where none exists. Japanese data, which is not tampered with, shows no warming in the last 50 years.
Next, carbon dioxide levels do not drive temperature. CO2 levels are a result of temperature changes. There has been a lot of obfuscation on this aspect of climate fraud. I urge anyone who actually believes nature’s trace gas can change the world’s temperatures to look more closely and more carefully. The seasonal variation in atmospheric CO2 correlates very well with the temperature, not with the human production of carbon dioxide. CO2 does not drive temperature. Temperature variation drives CO2 levels. It’s the reverse of what the UN is claiming. Global temperature itself is a product of atmospheric pressure, albedo, cloud cover and many other factors.
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—the UN IPCCC—computer models downplay the factors, especially cyclical variation in solar radiation, which the UN assumes to be minor as compared to changes in CO2. Unvalidated UN IPCCC climate models replace the most powerful modes of heat transfer—conduction, convection, latent heat of evaporation and condensation—with just radiation. In other words, UN IPCCC climate models are rigged to blame CO2 because the real factors are minimised in the construction of these models. No wonder these fake models have already been proven comprehensively wrong.
The next lie is that the Great Barrier Reef is dying. Great Barrier Reef coral cover was the highest on record in 2024. The reef is healthy, yet the scare stories continue. Every time the green scammers claim the Great Barrier Reef is losing coral to scare you, the phones start ringing in north Queensland with tourists cancelling their bookings. Tour operators and the communities they support suffer, staff lose their shifts and their livelihoods, and businesses close, all for a political lie, a fraud. The reef covers 344,000 square kilometres. That’s five times the area of Tasmania. There will always be an area on the reef where an unusually low tide on a hot day causes localised bleaching with still winds. That damage repairs naturally and quickly, as it has for 14,000 years. There will always be a flood dumping fresh water onto the reef and killing the saltwater coral polyps. It’s happening right now in Far North Queensland. So stay tuned for scare stories just about coral bleaching blamed on climate change when the cause will actually be these floods in time for the election.
The next lie is that the sea levels are rising. Since the end of the mini ice age 200 hundred years ago, ocean levels have risen a tiny amount. In 1914, the mean sea level at Fort Denison in Sydney Harbour was 1.11 metres. In 2014, 100 years later, it was 1.12 metres—one centimetre, 10 millimetres. That is natural variation.
The next lie is that the polar ice is melting. In Antarctica there will always be an area of unusual warming associated with underground volcanos and hot springs, of which the Earth has thousands. Pressure builds up and they let off heat. They melt the ice above, and then they go dormant again. In 2009, John Kerry predicted, ‘In five years scientists predict we will have the first ice-free arctic summer.’ It didn’t happen, along with the other failed scares. The arctic ice cap floats and moves with natural varying wind and ocean current directions. In fact, after 40 years of unprecedented man-made global boiling, there’s more Antarctic sea ice now than there was 40 years ago.
It’s time to acquit carbon dioxide. The great climate scam is about submitting to the world’s predatory billionaires delivering up our agriculture, transport, energy, manufacturing and industrial base, food, and property rights in the name of saving the planet. In reality, it’s just greed—less for you and more for them—and it’s control.
One Nation saw through this scam in 1996, and we’ve opposed the agenda ever since. We have opposed the $200 billion wasted so far on net zero measures. Bloomberg now puts the cost of completing Australia’s transition to net zero, including the electrification of cars, homes and appliances, at $1.9 trillion. That’s a terrifying figure. The few hundred billion dollars spent so far have added so much to our electricity costs that bills are doubling or tripling. The pain is only just starting.
The lie that solar and wind are cheaper because the wind and sun are free is not supported with evidence. To the contrary—the more solar and wind are added to the grid, the dearer our electricity becomes. The reason is simple. While the wind and sun are free, wind turbines, solar panels, back-up batteries, 15,000 kilometres of extra transmission lines and access roads are very expensive to make, transport, install and maintain. While a modern coal or nuclear power plant lasts 60 years, solar panels, wind turbines and back-up batteries only last 15. The $1.9 trillion will only get us to 2050. After that, every 15 years, solar and wind will need to be replaced at a cost of hundreds of billions more.
Enough of this madness, this fraud. If elected, One Nation will abolish the federal department of climate change, all their related agencies and programs, including all net zero measures and mandates. This will return $30 billion a year to the Treasury, forming part of One Nation’s pledge to reduce $80 billion in government spending in our first term. More importantly, it will return billions of dollars a year into the pockets of homeowners and businesses, making everything you buy cheaper and more affordable. That’s how to solve the cost-of-living crisis. It’s time to end the net zero scam. One Nation will end the net zero scam.
The Clean Energy Regulator is a $115 million dollar agency dedicated to implementing the UN’s Net Zero plans on Australia. I pressed for transparency regarding executive salaries and the total cost to taxpayers, expressing surprise at the reluctance to readily provide this information.
I also challenged the effectiveness and necessity of the carbon market, describing it as a concocted market driven by regulations rather than genuine demand. It’s essentially a made up cost inflicted on Australia. These are the kind of agencies we could simply get rid of and Australian’s lives would get better.
Transcript
Senator ROBERTS: Thank you for appearing again today. A similar question to the others in the alphabet soup of climate change and energy agencies: as simply and specifically as possible, what does the Clean Energy Regulator do? Could you tell me the basic accountabilities and the uniqueness of those accountabilities?
Mr Binning: As I stated previously, we’re an economic regulator for the purpose of accelerating carbon abatement for Australia. We do this by administering a range of schemes on behalf of the Australian government.
Senator ROBERTS: Did you say you were an accelerator or a regulator?
Mr Binning: A regulator. We have two outcomes currently within our corporate objectives. The first is to contribute to a reduction in Australia’s net greenhouse gas emissions, including through the administration of market based mechanisms that incentivise reduction in emissions and the promotion of additional renewable electricity generation. The second is to contribute to the sustainable management of Australia’s biodiversity through the administration of market based mechanisms.
Senator ROBERTS: Is your uniqueness the latter?
Mr Binning: Our uniqueness is that we manage or administer the various government schemes, particularly where they involve the formation of a market.
Senator ROBERTS: The carbon dioxide market or carbon market?
Mr Binning: Yes, Senator.
Senator ROBERTS: How many employees do you have?
Mr Binning: We have around 400.
Senator ROBERTS: Could you tell me the breakdown of permanent and employees and contractors?
CHAIR: Are we going to the annual report again?
Senator ROBERTS: I don’t know. We’ll find out.
Mr Binning: A lot of that information will be contained in our annual report. Our chief operating officer will just come up. Perhaps if we move to the next question, then she can follow up.
Senator ROBERTS: What’s the total wage bill for all employees, including casuals and contractors?
Mr Binning: Ms Pegorer will be able to help you out with that detail.
Ms Pegorer: Can I just confirm your question was with regard to the number or the breakdown of our staff?
Senator ROBERTS: Permanent, casual and contractors, please.
Ms Pegorer: I don’t have that level of detail with me, unfortunately. I do have the number of contracting staff that we’ve had from January this year until October and the number of FTE, but I don’t have the number of casuals or non-ongoing.
Senator ROBERTS: Can we get them on notice, please?
Mr Binning: Yes.
Senator ROBERTS: What’s the total wage bill for all of those people: permanents, casuals and contractors?
Mr Binning: Again, we don’t carry that data in that form with us, so it’s best we take that on notice.
Senator ROBERTS: What’s the total budget for the Clean Energy Regulator, including any grants or programs you administer?
Mr Binning: Our departmental funding is around $115 million. Our administered revenue associated with the programs that we run is in the order of $37 million. However, I would just note for the record that where we have our greatest impact is actually in the issuance of certificates that then carry value in a marketplace, so both with renewable energy and with the Australian Carbon Credit Unit Scheme we issue certificates that are of material value and which are then financial instruments managed through our registries.
Senator ROBERTS: It’s fair to say, isn’t it, that this is not a market meeting people’s needs; this is a market to meet regulations and global regulations as well—concocted needs, if you like. I’m not diminishing your work.
Mr Binning: No, I probably wouldn’t quite characterise it in that way. We administer schemes that are made by government, so if you take, for example, the Australian Carbon Credit Unit Scheme acting in conjunction with the safeguard mechanism, it then forms both the supply and demand side. Safeguard mechanisms are required through the regulations to manage their emissions within their baseline or source unit certificates. Then the ACCU generates a supply of Australian carbon credit units, and they facilitate trade in order to meet their obligations.
Senator ROBERTS: There’s no open market as such. There’s no clamouring of citizens for carbon dioxide credits. They’re a concoction of Malcolm Turnbull and Greg Hunt in 2015, just before Christmas, and bolstered by Chris Bowen in September of 2022 with the extension of the safeguard mechanism.
Senator Ayres: I think you are asking the official for, at best, an opinion.
Senator ROBERTS: What’s your opinion?
Senator Ayres: The truth is that these schemes are administered by this agency in the best interests of keeping costs down for Australian electricity consumers and efficiently managing the process of reducing emissions across sectors, and it’s judged by successive governments that, to be in the interests of doing that in the most efficient way possible, that kind of capability is retained in the agency who’s in front of you today.
Senator ROBERTS: Let me understand that. We’ve got a scheme that’s been concocted that’ll add more cost to energy—
Senator Ayres: It wasn’t concocted.
Senator ROBERTS: Hang on. It’ll add more cost, and now we’ve got a market in place due to regulations to try to bring it down.
Senator Ayres: No, I don’t agree with that.
Senator ROBERTS: Last question, then. No-one can identify a fundamental need of people. There’s no market other than the concocted market, the fabricated market.
Mr Binning: The only thing I would note in addition to the requirement for people to comply with the various government regulatory structures is that there has over recent years been a reasonably strong emergence of a voluntary market both for Australian carbon credit units and for renewable energy certificates. On the Australian carbon credit side we see in the order of a million units surrendered per annum, and on the electricity side we see very significant surrenders of certificates in the order of 10 million over and above the 33 million that is the regulated target. A lot of what has driven that are the various objectives, particularly across corporate Australia, for voluntary emissions reduction and meeting their own targets and the desire to source credible renewable energy of high integrity to do that, so the market is both performing its regulatory functions and facilitating voluntary participation.
Senator ROBERTS: I notice peppered through your statement there—and I thank you for the statement—are the words ‘regulated’, ‘comply’ and ‘carbon credits’—I call them ‘carbon dioxide credits’. These are all to make the best of a concocted market that’s only there because of regulations. It’s only there because nowhere in the world, as I understand it, has carbon dioxide been designated a pollutant. I just make that point. Final question: what is the total salary package of everyone here at the desk, particularly executive level—what band?
Mr Binning: As I think other agencies have done, our executive remuneration is in our annual report.
Senator ROBERTS: Is that the complete cost including on-costs?
Mr Binning: That’s the salaries associated with those. If you are seeking other information related to our salaries, we will take it on notice and come back to you.
Senator ROBERTS: I want the total cost that the taxpayer pays for you, for example, not just what you get in the hand but everything as part of the package.
CHAIR: Again, I would suggest that you have a look at the annual report and, if it doesn’t give you sufficient detail, that you then place a question on notice for further detail from the officials.
Senator ROBERTS: Just one final question, building on the last one: why is there so much reluctance to share the salaries? Surely you would know what you cost.
Mr Binning: We report executive remuneration as part of our annual reporting cycle. That’s the data that I bring to these committee meetings. If there is other information that you’re seeking and it’s information that’s
generally publicly available, we would be delighted to supply it on notice.
Senator ROBERTS: But you would know your total costs to the taxpayers?
Senator Ayres: Senator Roberts, it’s a pretty unfair line of questioning. The official has said—
Senator ROBERTS: What’s unfair about it?
Senator Ayres: The official has said the remuneration details. It’s pretty unfair to characterise it as the official not answering your question, is what I mean.
Senator ROBERTS: I didn’t characterise it that way. You’re fabricating now, Senator Ayres.
Senator Ayres: What he has said is that information is now publicly available in their report, which you could have read on the way here. In addition to that, if there is more information that he can provide, he will provide it on notice.
Senator ROBERTS: Thank you.
Senator Ayres: You can’t ask for more than that.
Senator ROBERTS: No, and I made the observation that I’m surprised that people don’t know this or can’t readily divulge it. That’s all. Thank you, Chair.
Why are grocery prices still going up when we have better technology and more efficient farms than ever before?
The answer is that the cost of energy is making your grocery bills more expensive. Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton are equally committed to making electricity more expensive and increasing the price of food.
One Nation is the only party that will end net-zero policies to return cheap power and cheaper groceries to Australians.
Transcript
Yesterday, Richard Forbes of Independent Food Distributors Australia told the Australian newspaper:
As far as I am concerned, the government’s energy policy has and continues to increase the price of food.
Employers supplying food to major supermarkets and thousands of cafes, restaurants and pubs around the country have launched a revolt against the government’s energy policies, urging more gas and coal-fired power to bring down electricity prices.
The managing director of Western Australia’s largest independent food distributor said his company’s electricity bill had doubled in the past three years. This energy policy driving up food prices is called net zero. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and opposition leader Peter Dutton are completely committed to the net zero policies that are driving up the price of your groceries. As part of that net zero policy, coal and gas generators are told to turn off completely whenever wind and solar decide to turn on, which is unpredictable.
The problem is coal-fired power stations are what’s called base-load power; they’re designed to run constantly, not to flick on and off like they’re being forced to now. That abuse leads to higher maintenance costs and, in the worst case, power stations failing, blowing up. Even with this unsustainable switching-on-and-off situation, the coal burnt in a coal-fired power station costs just $21 a megawatt hour. This financial year, solar and wind capital South Australia’s average power price has been $200 a megawatt hour, a bit under 10 times higher than a coal station’s fuel costs.
Instead of making coal stations flick on and off completely, run them continuously to provide base-load power, and electricity will instantly get cheaper and more reliable. Wind and solar can top up the rest—when they work—and households can keep using their own solar power—simple. Only One Nation will bring down power prices down and grocery bills to put more money in your pocket.
Renewables are incredibly destructive to our environment and good, productive farmland.
This is a great documentary from Advance Australia covering how people pushing net-zero like the Greens party are doing huge harm to our environment and ability to feed ourselves.
I’ve got a very simple goal – make it as cheap as possible to turn the lights on. Peter Dutton and Anthony Albanese say we should comply with the Paris Agreement instead.
You can only trust One Nation to put Australia and your power bills first.
There’s only one party that can be trusted to put Australia first.
Don’t believe the pretenders in the Liberal-Nationals who want to let unelected foreign organisations tell us what to do under net-zero.
Coal-fired power stations and nuclear power stations each have about 40 hectares of footprint, with a very narrow target transmission lines straight to the cities. In contrast, solar and wind installations are scattered and located away from the main cities, taking up enormous amounts of space. Their energy density is very low, requiring a vast amount of land to produce the same power, and they aren’t on consistently. This increases transmission costs and the amount of land that regions must devote to solar, wind, and now batteries, causing significant angst.
Around the world, every country that has increased the proportion of solar and wind has also increased the cost of electricity for consumers and destroyed their manufacturing base. For example, look at Germany.
A surface coalmine must pay a bond for every hectare uncovered each year, and if it is rehabilitated properly to a superior standard than it was originally, they get their money back. However, there is no such bond for solar and wind companies to set aside funds for decommissioning their complexes at the end of their life. This needs to change!
Transcript
Senator ROBERTS: Thank you for appearing again. Your predecessor said, ‘Australia’s random renewable energy push needs to be overhauled and a nationwide stocktake is required to determine what should be built and where it should go.’ Are you committed to that overall overhaul?
Mr Sheldon: That is an observation or recommendation made by Mr Dyer, and I think that’s been built into the review that Mr Duggan has just been talking about. So all those action plans and so on are designed to
ensure—
Senator ROBERTS: When’s that coming out? I’m sorry, I missed it.
Mr Duggan: The action plan has been agreed by the Energy and Climate Change Ministerial Council, so that’s now a public document. So we’re in the process now of implementing. The full response to the review was
published on 19 July.
Senator ROBERTS: Thank you. So that’s been included in their recommendations?
Mr Duggan: Yes, that’s right.
Senator ROBERTS: Mr Dyer also said, ‘The sort of granular planning required for a once in a generation transformation to secure the nation’s energy supply still had not happened.’ Is that now in the report as well—
granular planning?
Mr Duggan: Yes, this was a recommendation to governments. As you would know, a lot of the detail, the specific planning around land use and specific locations of related transmission, sits with the state governments
and involves a very big input from the local governments. So a lot of the argumentation around that recommendation was to point to some of the best practice that already exists and to encourage that to be taken up
by the other states and territories.
Senator ROBERTS: There’s a lot of pain in the regions now, because they’re bearing the brunt of solar and wind disturbances.
Mr Duggan: What the report highlighted was that, certainly where best practice is not happening, there was an opportunity to improve the way projects are being delivered to the betterment of communities. That’s
absolutely correct.
Senator ROBERTS: It seems like it’s hell for leather, just do whatever you want. And there’s a lot of cash flying around, which is inducing councils to bypass some of their own ordinances, as we understand it.
Senator Ayres: Senator Roberts, the government inherited the last government’s framework and commissioned Mr Dyer to do this report because it’s in the interests of rural and regional communities and of an
effective rollout of generation and transmission capability that we improve the governance and consultation processes and all of the things that are included in Mr Dyer’s report. That’s what’s motivated the government to commission this report. On those nine recommendations, I think Mr Duggan said three of them are directed towards the Commonwealth, because there are multiple participants in this process, but they have, essentially, all been adopted. It’s our job now to operationalise that effectively in a way that addresses, I think, many of the issues that you raise.
Senator ROBERTS: Thank you for that, Minister. Are you aware that a coal-fired power station and a nuclear power station have about 40 hectares of footprint, and that’s it, and a very narrow target transmission
corridor straight to the main users, which are the cities and the provincial cities? Solar and wind are scattered and away from the main cities and they take up enormous room. Their energy density is very low, which means that you need an enormous amount of land to produce the same power. And even then you can’t produce it regularly. So that increases transmission costs, and the amount of land the regions are devoting to solar, wind and transmission, and also now to batteries. It’s causing a lot of angst. Are you aware of that?
Senator Ayres: I’m certainly aware, on one hand, that, with the processes for approval and consultation with these projects, we were operating with the last government’s processes, and we are working to improve those. I’m also aware that you’re trying to make a broader point, I guess, about the merit or otherwise of the approach that is being taken by the government and the states and Commonwealth in terms of building an energy system for the future. I appreciate that you’re not one of the coalition MPs here, but I think it’s hard to make an argument about community consultation on one hand, and then do a press release that says: ‘We’re going to turn up with seven nuclear reactors in your neighbourhood, whether you like it or not. We’re not going to tell you how much they cost, or how many of them we’re going to build—but, Muswellbrook, here you go, whether you like it or not, a nuclear reactor’—
Senator ROBERTS: I agree with you. A coal-fired power station would be fine—
Senator Ayres: That will be very expensive. What we know, and I think the evidence that you’ve heard today shows—and I understand you don’t agree with it; I think you’ve demonstrated over time that you are impervious to the facts and evidence that are provided by the agencies—
Senator ROBERTS: I do the contrary, Minister. I love evidence.
Senator Ayres: That’s your right, I understand that. But the shift to the cheapest form of energy is what the government is interested in here. Claims are made—some of them very wild claims, and some of them
somewhere between misinformation and disinformation—about the scale of land that is required for these projects. I understand that people make those claims and some people retweet them and repost them—pretty
irresponsible in my view. But we have commissioned the Dyer report for a reason; that is, to improve the processes. The minister believes, and the government believes, that adopting those, together with the appointment of Mr Mahar and other steps that the government is undertaking, will improve the effectiveness of the consultation process as we get on with one of the most important nation building things that government can do, and that is to deliver the lowest cost, most reliable energy system as we upgrade our energy system so that we can have manufacturing jobs and low cost, reliable, renewable energy and storage for households and business into the future. It’s a decades-long pathway and we’re determined to do it in the most efficient way possible for the Australian people.
Senator ROBERTS: There are two things I would remind you of, Minister. One is that the energy density drives the cost, and physics does not change the very low energy density of solar and wind, whereas coal and
especially nuclear are very high energy density. The second thing is that, everywhere around the world, every country that has increased the proportion of solar wind, has increased the cost of electricity for consumers and destroyed their manufacturing base. Have a look at Germany. Something that Mr Dyer was very passionate about was rehabilitation bonds, so that these wind and solar companies have put money away for decommissioning the complexes at the end of life. A surface coalmine has to pay a bond for every hectare uncovered each year, and then, at the end of the life of the mine, if it’s rehabilitated properly, to a superior standard than it was originally, they get their money back. There is no bond for solar and wind. What work have you done on putting reforms to government that would ensure there is money put away to clean up the environment, not just leave a toxic wasteland? Specifically, what have you done with the government?
Mr Sheldon: Can I just clarify that question? Is it: what work has the AEIC done to raise that issue with government?
Senator ROBERTS: Yes.
Mr Sheldon: I think Mr Dyer raised that. It was in his annual report in 2022 that he raised this issue about performance bonds in relation to wind farms in particular.
Senator ROBERTS: And what work has been done in following up?
Mr Sheldon: It’s certainly one of those issues that does get raised with us. It’s not in the top 10 or so issues that are raised with us in the complaints that we receive. We’re like a small ombudsman. We receive complaints. It’s an issue that does get raised. During the time that I’ve been in the role, from 2 April this year, it has been raised a few times, but it’s certainly not the top issue. In terms of what is happening, I think since 2022, when Mr Dyer raised the issue, what I’ve observed in the time that I’ve been in the role is that, in different jurisdictions, there’s certainly work done to increase transparency. One of our roles, I guess, in the AEIC is to promote more transparency around these projects.
Senator ROBERTS: What, specifically, have you done?
Mr Sheldon: It’s not our role to implement policy. We’ve identified issues and we certainly monitor them. New South Wales, for example, has recently worked on its renewable energy plan, which includes standard
clauses and so on around the landholders in relation to this sort of issue. We’re monitoring that, but we don’t have responsibility for implementing it, as a complaint handling body. If we identify good examples, we’ll identify them as part of our role.
Senator ROBERTS: So what are you doing, specifically, to make sure that the bonds come into place?
Mr Sheldon: We don’t have a role to implement putting that in place. It’s certainly something we can raise as an issue. We have a range of mechanisms to do that. One of them is the annual report, which, obviously, comes out every year, on a calendar year basis. And part of what’s always been appended to that annual report is a series of observations that have really been built on the observations of the commissioner over many years—which is where the observation was made in 2022. That’s a place where we can raise that with officials that do have policy responsibility for these sorts of matters. That’s generally how we do it. We also have a website where we would raise things. We have reporting obligations to the minister. So, if we identify an issue, we obviously include that in our observations or reports.
CHAIR: Senator Roberts, can I ask if you have much more to go? We’re running terribly behind.
Senator ROBERTS: I just want to make a comment to the minister. Minister, this is a comment, but there’s no reflection on the people at the table with you right now, because they’re interim—well, you’re not in interim,
but Mr Dyer was a thorough professional—
Senator Ayres: We’re all interim in one sense or another, Senator Roberts.
Senator ROBERTS: Mr Dyer was a thorough professional, who did his job extremely well. We happily endorsed him in Senate estimates. He was effectively an ombudsman, and a very good one.
While I’ve covered much of this material in my Senate speeches, Matt masterfully brings it all together in just 1 hour and 18 minutes. He also makes a powerful point about NSW Labor’s attempts to alter voting patterns to entrench their hold on power. Sly move!
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Malcolm’s Fight
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