Wednesday, 29 May 2024

Nuclear energy

Lauren KATHAGE (Yan Yean) (17:15): I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall when there was the Zoom call from Canberra to Melbourne: ‘It’s Peter here. We’re going nuclear.’ I imagine a moment of disbelief in the Leader of the Opposition’s eyes before he said, ‘Yes, Peter.’ The meeting finishes. Somebody says, ‘Oh, great. Now we’ve got to tell the Nats.’ They call the Nats. Do not worry; they are all over it: ‘We just voted for it. No dramas.’ So they have adopted a new policy. All right, let us go to the comms team: ‘We’ve got a job for you. We’ve got something that’s super expensive to build and that has higher power prices. It’s dangerous and it won’t be ready in time. Can you sell that, please, to the Victorian public?’ No wonder the comms director quit.

Let us go through those points: it is dangerous. That is the first point of the comms director’s brief that I would like to focus on. I would like to help the new comms director. It is dangerous: the waste has to be protected for 100,000 years. So it is not just dangerous for us or our children or our grandchildren or our great-great-great-great-great grandchildren. One hundred thousand years – that is how long it is dangerous for.

I used to live in Kakadu National Park, where we had the Ranger uranium mine, which I am sure many of you would remember was fiercely objected to by the Mirarr people, who own the land there, and by many activists. Even some from down here in Melbourne travelled up to Kakadu. It was a big deal for Australia to have a proposed uranium mine. Anyway, it went ahead, and in the time that it has been operating there have been more than 200 leaks, spills and other incidents. So we might think, ‘Chernobyl was a long time ago. Technology has improved so much since then. We’ll be fine. We’ll be sweet.’ Well, I can tell you that in 2013 an acid leach tank collapsed there and 1 million litres of radioactive ore slurry spilled, and the area had to be evacuated. Prior to that, in 2004 they somehow had the processing water connected to the drinking water, and the water uranium levels were 400 times the Australian standard. And we want that in Victoria, something so dangerous?

Brad Rowswell interjected.

Lauren KATHAGE: Where would you like it, member for Sandringham? Would you like it in your electorate?

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Through the Chair.

Lauren KATHAGE: Sorry, that is right. Where would you like it, Deputy Speaker?

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Reflecting.

Lauren KATHAGE: Yes, thank you. I wonder where, for example, the member Sandringham would like the power plant to be. Would he like a power plant in his electorate or would he prefer the nuclear waste to be in his electorate? It is one of those difficult either/or games – do you want the plant or do you want the waste? I would suggest that those on that side who are proposing to have such dangerous things imposed on our community might like to discuss it with their community first and see what their community thinks about that.

A member interjected.

Lauren KATHAGE: Yes, a big town hall discussion. I think their community would be shocked to hear that they are even countenancing such a thing. What a shock. That is the comms director’s first dot point filled in.

The next area our new comms director for the Liberal Party will need to focus on is the cost to build. We know that the estimated cost to build plants that are currently in construction just goes up. We know that those opposite hate major projects that become more expensive, so wait till they hear how much the Hinkley C blew out by. In two years the cost increased by $30 billion – a $30 billion increase in two years. We know that it has become so expensive to build that I think now they are saying something like $60 billion for one plant. And it is not going to be quick either – you will not be able to enjoy the radioactive glow for many, many years. When it was announced in 2008 they thought it would take 10 years. The current estimate is 2031 and it is getting later and later. We know that we cannot have nuclear in Australia any time before 2040, we know that coal plants are going offline before then, and we know that we are going to have renewable-powered energy by then. So they are going to have to find a way to explain to the Victorian public why they are willing to spend $30 billion-plus on something that we do not need.

Because of that expense of building such a thing and the way that the power is generated, it is actually the most expensive power that you can expect people to pay for in their bills. This side of the house is all about making power bills cheaper for Victorians. We do that through lots of different ways. Obviously changing to renewables is one way that we are keeping prices down. We have just seen again another Victorian default offer which is $100 less. We have got the cheapest wholesale power on the mainland, and that is one of the reasons why we are going for renewable energy.

When they come in and think about the cost of nuclear energy, they also need to think about the cost of the clean-up – how much it is going to cost to clean up the inevitable nuclear waste spill – because in Fukushima it cost hundreds of billions of dollars to clean up what happened there. So when they are adding up on the back of the envelope the cost to Victoria of going for nuclear, please add a few hundred billion dollars for the clean-up. The cost of the energy from the Hinkley nuclear power plant that I was talking about started at £43 per kilowatt, and now that has climbed to £191 per kilowatt. It just gets dearer and dearer and dearer, and that is the opposite of renewables, which get cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. Our former chief scientist has said that the trajectory of renewable energy power prices is just down, down, down. It is getting cheaper, and this government is absolutely focused on cheaper power for Victorians.

We have all of that info ready now for the new Liberal Party comms team, so how are they going to sell this? The comms director’s first suggestion, pointing to Canberra – blaming Peter Dutton – that is a classic ‘I don’t hold the hose, mate’ Liberal approach, blaming Canberra. All right, they have got a new idea – ‘How about we try misinformation?’ ‘No, we tried that with COVID.’ ‘What about fearmongering?’ ‘I mean, that’s par for the course, right, fearmongering, but unfortunately focus group feedback is that people are less scared of solar panels than nuclear waste, so that’s not going to work either.’ ‘All right, okay, look, we need to get the youth on our side. How about we start a nuclear internship program?’ It sounds like a joke, but it is true. Those opposite in the upper house have started a nuclear internship program –

Members interjecting.

Lauren KATHAGE: I know. I was shocked too, member for Warrandyte. Why go after the poor youth with such poor science, radical ideology and what will definitely cost their families countless amounts of money and potentially wipe out future generations of this state? That is exactly what I said: ‘Won’t someone think of the youth?’ Well, I will. I have got a message for those opposite: no comms director is going to be able to sell this pup. This is a joke, and the people of Victoria are not laughing. They are not laughing. You cannot sell this to them; they are too smart for you.

Victorians have voted for this side of the house for a reason – for many reasons, actually, and I would love to take you through some of those reasons. It is because we set targets and we smash them. We have the strongest climate change legislation in the country, and Victorians have overwhelmingly voted for the next steps in our ambitious agenda. We are decarbonising at the fastest rate in the country, and since this government was elected in 2014 we have cut emissions by more than any other state. Our targets are delivering the most rapid reduction of emissions in Australia, which is unlocking billions of dollars of investment and creating thousands of jobs. We already smashed the 2020 target, and in 2021 we achieved a 32.3 per cent reduction in emissions. And we are backing things up with massive investments. We have got almost $2 billion in programs to reduce emissions. We are really putting our money where our mouth is.

We have got our nation-leading offshore wind target, which we debated in the house a few weeks ago, which will have 2 gigawatts of offshore wind come online by 2032, with 4 gigawatts by 2035 and 9 ‍gigawatts by 2040. That 9 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2040 will happen before they could even flip the switch on a nuclear power plant coming online. The solar projects that we have announced will help us power 100 per cent of government operations. Police stations, hospitals and metro trains and trams will all be totally renewable – but you will still need to tap on and off, please.

There is also support – and this is probably what, at the end of the day, I am most proud of and what the average punter is most interested in – for Victorian families to have cheaper power bills. I have gone over some of the ways we are doing that in terms of changing to renewables, but we are also doing it through the Victorian energy upgrades program, which means that people can come off expensive forms of power and appliances and they can save I believe – the minister will correct me, I am sure – something like $1200 per year with solar. That is a massive amount of money. Do you know how many school shoes that is? That is a lot of pairs of school shoes for families and a lot of school uniforms, so it makes a real difference to families if we can bring power prices down.

They say the basis of everything is good health, and the reality is that renewable energy is clean energy. Nuclear energy is not good for the health of Victorian families. We do not want to be, in our state, surrounded by nuclear waste for hundreds of thousands of years. That is not going to help us to be the nation-leading state that we are. We would be a joke. The joke would be on us from Canberra. I think perhaps Canberra has identified the weakest link in that chain of Liberal state branches. They have identified the weakest link, and it is in Victoria. Unfortunately, it sounds like the three-eyed fish here has taken that bait hook, line and sinker. I tell you what, that fish is being reeled in, and it is not going to taste good. Nobody wants that nuclear here.

Our government is the government that is bringing back the SEC. Our government is bringing the extra 59,000 jobs that come with the SEC, with 6000 apprenticeships. I do not know what the member for Eildon will be doing by the time those nuclear power plants come online, because that will be decades from now. God forbid those opposite should ever be in government and bring nuclear power to the state of Victoria.