MPI Gas industry 15/06/2021

First of all, I'd like to touch on Senator Waters' comments about public money being used for energy projects in this country. The Morrison government has committed billions and billions of dollars to renewable energy—not the least $10 billion in the Clean Energy Fund; $5 billion in the Snowy Hydro; $3.5 billion for the Climate Solutions Package; $2.5 billion for the Emissions Reduction Fund; $1.5 billion for the Australian Renewable Energy Agency; $1 billion for the Grid Reliability Fund, which has now become another fund; and $0.5 billion for the Hydrogen Strategy. That comes to about $24 billion all up.

My view is that you either nationalise the energy market or let the market rip. But this idea of going around subsidising energy producers regardless of the type of energy is not on. I think the private industry should pay their fair share of tax. If they make money, they should pay money. In terms of putting in roads to enable this to happen, I'm more than happy to argue that they should pay their fair share of tax on that. However, the Beetaloo Basin does have over 200,000 petajoules of shale gas in place. To put that in perspective, Australia currently uses 1,920 petajoules a year, both for domestic use and for export. So there is over 100 years of gas just for Australia in the Beetaloo Basin. So we'd be mad not to use our own natural resources where we can. We cannot rely on wind and solar alone. It's intermittent energy, and, ultimately, it's not renewable and it's not clean either—which I'll talk about in a minute...
For the full speech visit my website at: gerardrennick.com.au