THE HON TANYA PLIBERSEK MP
MINISTER FOR THE ENVIRONMENT
FEDERAL MEMBER FOR SYDNEY
SPEECH
HANSARD: Future Made in Australia Bill 2024, Future Made in Australia (Omnibus Amendments No. 1) Bill 2024 - Second Reading
Wednesday 21 August 2024
I want to thank the member for calling the quorum to make sure I had some of my colleagues here. It's wonderful! It gives me the opportunity to tell the chamber some things. I'm sorry that the member for Lindsay has gone. I was going to school her a bit on some of the things that she got wrong. I don't have time to go through all the things that she got wrong. But we on this side know that we inherited a cost-of-living crisis. We know. Everything we've done every day since being elected has been aimed at dealing with that cost-of-living crisis. Is it job done? No way. We don't accept for a moment that it's job done. But, at every step of the way, we have been opposed by those opposite. We have delivered better tax cuts and fairer tax cuts, more for low- and middle-income Australians and less for me. That's fair enough. I'm happy with that. We have delivered real wage rises for the first time in a decade. Those opposite confessed that, under their government, low wages were a deliberate design feature of their economic architecture. They said it. We didn't say it about them; they said it. We know that that's what would happen if they were elected again.
The other thing I just wanted to mention is that the member for Lindsay was talking about, 'These are the things we need to do if we want to blah, blah, blah.' You know what? In typical fashion for the coalition parties, we heard nothing, no detail. Can you believe that almost three years into a coalition opposition, they have not a single costed policy that they will take to the next election? They have no policies to deal with the cost-of-living crisis that we admit and agree is the most important thing facing the Australian people at the moment. Instead of talking about the cost of living in here, every question every day in question time is about visas. They have the opportunity to stand up and tell the people of Australia what they would do to help with the cost of living, rather than opposing everything that we are trying to do to help with the cost of living. They're the people who set the fire and now they've put the roadblocks up so the fire engine can't get there when it comes to the cost of living. If you asked them, 'What would you do to help ordinary people with their cost of living?' what could they say? They have not a single policy to help Australians with the cost of living.
Moving on to this terrific piece of legislation, the Future Made in Australia Bill 2024, this morning was a great example of what a future made in Australia looks like, because we announced the environmental tick-off for Australia's largest renewable energy project and one of the largest in the world. This is something that my colleague Minister Chris Bowen has been working so hard on—to see this energy transition through. The announcement today of environmental approval for SunCable means that the Albanese Labor government has now ticked off enough renewable energy to power seven million homes. The energy transition is real. It's happening now. Cheaper, cleaner, renewable energy for households and businesses will be better for the environment, be better for jobs, bring down prices and increase certainty. We know that the SunCable project will be economically and socially transformative for the Northern Territory. Of course, it's about the power that will be exported in the future from this proposal, but it's also about the power that will be used in Darwin and what it will be used for. SunCable estimates the project will deliver more than $20 billion in economic value to the Northern Territory and support an average of 6,800 direct and indirect jobs for each year of the construction phase, with a peak workforce of 14,300. I think one of the most critical things about this is that we've managed with SunCable to design a product that actually avoids the significant negative impacts on the environment that you would normally worry about with a project of this size. They've designed the project to avoid ghost bat colonies and make sure that protected species like the greater bilby are protected with the rollout of this project.
One of the things that are so exciting about the Future Made in Australia Bill and the plan itself is how critical this renewable energy future is to our economy in the future. From my perspective as environment minister, of course, reducing climate related risks is one of the very best things that we can do to protect our environment. But renewable energy also means that, through our renewable energy resources here in Australia, we are uniquely placed to benefit from a transformation that's not just happening in Australia—although it is happening in Australia—but actually happening globally. There is global demand for renewable energy. We want to be able to export it, through projects like green hydrogen and this cable, in the way that we have exported coal and gas in the past, and we want to export the products that are made with renewable energy because those products will be in increasing demand around the world as economies do their best to decarbonise internationally.
If we want to remain competitive in this changing world, we need to have a plan, and that plan is this Future Made in Australia. It is extraordinary to see those opposite lining up to complain about this transformative opportunity that we have for this country. This plan provides clarity, certainty and a framework for companies that want to invest in new projects that create jobs and wealth, particularly in regional Australia. The only thing that we have heard about regional Australia from those opposite is that they want to build some nuclear reactors there. The idea that nuclear reactors built in 20 years time can do anything for the cost of living now or for—
Dr Webster: Twenty?
Ms Plibersek: The member opposite says 'not 20 years time'. Is it 15? When will they be built?
Dr Webster: Oh, it's not for me to say.
Ms Plibersek: Oh, right. Apparently, it's not for the Leader of the Opposition to say either, because he hasn't said it yet! So they've got a nuclear fantasy of energy in 15 or 20 years time—the most expensive new form of energy—and they won't tell us any of the details of that. They won't release the costings. Instead, as I said this morning, we are in a transformation of the Australian economy that can bring cheaper power, the jobs that come with it and the household bill relief that comes with it, and it's happening now, not in 20 years time.
Our plan includes investing in renewable hydrogen, critical minerals processing, green metals, green energy technologies and low-carbon liquid fuels. The example that SunCable gave today was those energy-hungry big data centres that are being built around the world right now, particularly as AI expands. That's exactly the sort of project you would like to see this kind of renewable energy able to power, on an industrial scale, in the Northern Territory.
In this year's federal budget we allocated around $8 billion to scale up green hydrogen that will be used to create green steel and replace gas in other manufacturing processes. We've invested a further $7 billion for critical minerals, the minerals that are used to make electric vehicles and batteries and that go into wind turbines. We've put another $1 billion into solar manufacturing and $500 million into making batteries. Australia can be a supplier of these new technologies. We've got all the raw materials and we've got more than our share of the smarts. Instead of investing here in Australia, we've been waving goodbye to these opportunities for too long. No longer. We have a plan for Australia to benefit from this transition, for the demand for these products, to cleaner, greener energy.
We've already seen, as I said, a substantial increase in renewable energy in the grid. We've seen a 25 per cent increase in renewable energy already, and we are continuing to tick off renewable energy projects at record rates. I have ticked off 55 so far. They are outstripping coal and gas projects, seven to one. Those opposite like to pretend that we're talking about renewables only. Of course, that's not the case. The Greens political party like to pretend that there's nothing happening with renewable energy. Nothing could be further from the truth. We've got record numbers of renewable energy projects in the pipeline ahead of us as well. Frankly, the market has decided that this is where investment in power is going. They've worked out that it is cheaper, as well as being cleaner.
Of course, my water portfolio has a critical role in Future Made in Australia as well. In May, we announced that the Commonwealth will contribute $65 million towards setting up a major desalination and water transport project in the Upper Spencer Gulf as part of the Future Made in Australia plan. That project includes plans for a seawater desalination plant at Cape Hardy capable of processing 260 megalitres a day, and a 600-kilometre pipeline to transport the treated water to Whyalla and to outback mining sites like Carrapateena and Roxby Downs.
At the moment, mining operations in the far north draw on water from the Great Artesian Basin, and, with the sort of scaling up that we want to see, that is particularly unsustainable. The Great Artesian Basin's water covers a large part of Australia, and it's very important for all sorts of uses. The hydrogen power station proposed for Whyalla needs a reliable and abundant supply of water to convert into hydrogen for power generation, and we are very happy to be partnering with the South Australian government to explore that opportunity. We're also providing $4 million to help First Nations communities to engage with those hydrogen project developers to take advantage of the jobs that can be created in regional and remote communities with this investment. Unlocking a vibrant domestic hydrogen industry is absolutely critical to our vision of being a renewable energy superpower and for a future made in Australia.
Of course, our plan doesn't just rely on these direct investments alone. We need a trained and skilled workforce. Those opposite spent years running down skills in our economy. We've invested in TAFE, with 500,000 fee-free TAFE places. I want to give credit to my very good friend Brendan O'Connor, the former minister, who did such amazing work in the area of skills. He will be sorely missed in this place not only as a skilled minister but also, more particularly, as a very, very decent human being.
It's not just the TAFE places. It's the additional investment in universities. It's the regional university centres that we're rolling out because we know we'll need the whole range of jobs, from skilled trades to PhD engineers and scientists, and everybody in between, as we transform our economy and grasp these opportunities that are there for the taking. With cyber capability, the research that universities are doing and the partnerships that we're supporting between private businesses and these critical inputs, you can see that our future made in Australia is bright. We are able to take the opportunities that this global transformation is offering Australia. With our unique advantages—our solar, our wind, and most particularly, our people: our hardworking, skilled, clever people—we can grasp those opportunities for a future made in Australia.
END
