Climate MPI 12/05/2021

The great Franklin Roosevelt once said that there's nothing to fear but fear itself, so it's good to speak to this urgency motion. For the record, I don't support any subsidies at all to any type of energy. Twenty years ago we were fed the neoliberal line that if you privatise the energy market, the market would fix itself. I can assure you that the market hasn't fixed itself, despite governments basically shovelling subsidies into all sorts of energy. We've heard a lot about the fossil fuel subsidies, which I don't think are all that high at all. I'll go into the renewable subsidies: there's $10 billion for the Clean Energy Finance Corporation; $5 billion for the Snowy Hydro, which purely exists so we can have a big battery for solar and wind; $3½ billion for the Climate Solutions Package; $2½ billion for the Australian Renewable Energy Agency; and another $1½ billion for the Grid Reliability Fund which got pulled and is now used for gas and things like that. Long story short: at just the federal level there's $20 billion in subsidies for renewable energy.

Then we've got the state subsidies, whereby we have the ridiculous proposition that the Queensland state government, for example, is paying foreign renewable providers for their energy, undermining our own home-grown coal, which is basically free and owned by the Queensland people. Kogan Creek Power Station actually sits on the coal mine, and coal gets funnelled straight up the conveyor belt, and it's all free because it's owned by the Queensland people. That used to generate about $1 billion to $2 billion in profits for the state government every year, and now last year it lost a billion dollars because it kept getting turned on and off. So there are lots of things I think that we should address. I think we've got 10 energy agencies just at the federal level. The whole energy market is completely ruined, and there needs to be a discussion about whether or not we nationalise all the base energy and start again, because it's out of control....
For the full speech visit my website at: gerardrennick.com.au