Power Outages

Mr MARSHALL (Dunstan—Leader of the Opposition) (14:22): My question is to the Minister for Mineral Resources and Energy. How will breaches of reliability standards, such as the loss of frequency events that occurred in September and again last night, impact local businesses and households?

The Hon. A. KOUTSANTONIS (West Torrens—Treasurer, Minister for Finance, Minister for State Development, Minister for Mineral Resources and Energy) (14:22): I think what the Leader of the Opposition has raised is a very good point, which the chief executive of BHP Billiton raised today: there is a lack of national leadership on this issue. I will read out his statement:

Olympic Dam's latest outage shows Australia's investability and jobs are placed in peril by the failure of policy to both reduce emissions and secure affordable, dispatchable and uninterrupted power.

The challenge to reduce emissions and grow the economy cannot fall to renewables alone.

This is a wake-up call ahead of the COAG meeting—

Members interjecting:

The Hon. A. KOUTSANTONIS: He is not calling for more coal, like members opposite—

and power supply and security must be top of the agenda and urgently addressed.

What BHP and Mr Mackenzie have grappled with is that there is a failure of national leadership and that coal is not the answer. Coal is not going to be the answer for Australia's future security needs of reliable base load energy; it is going to be gas. Gas is a transitional fuel. What Mr Mackenzie is calling for is a market mechanism to incentivise base load reliable gas-fired generation that will reduce emissions and give us base load energy.

What members opposite don't realise is that coal-fired generation does not belong in the 21^st century; it just does not. The Prime Minister himself has signed the Paris agreement, which must see us decarbonise our electricity system, and to decarbonise our electricity system we need base load transitional fuels to replace it. The only thing that will replace base load coal is base load gas.

The only policies in place that will incentivise base load gas is a national energy intensity scheme and that is what we will be arguing: not for more coal-fired generation but for more base load gas generation. Members opposite trying to ban gas to hang on to MacKillop and to hang on to Mount Gambier are going to put South Australians at risk of higher power prices.

Members interjecting:

The Hon. A. KOUTSANTONIS: The shouting and bleating of members opposite shows the realisation that their policies are a failure. Privatisation was a failure. Their gas policies are a failure. They have no renewable policies and it's a failure. It's a failure of leadership, and every major business community in this state, yesterday and the day before, called on the Leader of the Opposition to show some leadership. Indeed, they have said it's a lack of leadership from the Leader of the Opposition.

Gas is the future of the transition to renewable energy. What does Tom Playford think about looking down on a party that is privatising assets he built that gave us energy security, and they sold them to foreigners. They sold them offshore. They sold them offshore so shareholders in Hong Kong and in China can benefit from higher prices in South Australia, rather than the taxpayer.