Question Time

Alinta Energy

The Hon. D.W. RIDGWAY (Leader of the Opposition) (14:20): My question is to the Minister for Innovation and Leader of the Government in this place. Did Alinta's offer to the government to keep the Northern power station open in 2015 provide sufficient synchronous generation capacity to maintain the grid stability in the event of the Heywood interconnector becoming disconnected, and what generation capacity, frequency control and system restart services did Alinta offer to provide?

The Hon. K.J. MAHER (Minister for Employment, Minister for Aboriginal Affairs and Reconciliation, Minister for Manufacturing and Innovation, Minister for Automotive Transformation, Minister for Science and Information Economy) (14:21): I thank the honourable member for his questions. One thing I am not going to do in response to the member's questions is to get into the details of what was discussed between Alinta and the state government. The Treasurer and energy minister, who has the conduct of discussions with companies like Alinta, has made it very clear that he is not going to get into the fine-grained details of what was discussed—

Members interjecting:

The PRESIDENT: Order!

The Hon. K.J. MAHER: —in its entirety. If the honourable member is suggesting that any discussions that they have (should they ever form government) with any company will immediately be made available to the general public, that is an interesting policy proposition. Unless they say that they accept that they will also have discussions with companies that they will not immediately make available, then that must be their stated policy. I am not going to get into the fine-grained details of what was or was not discussed.

What is clear about their position is that they would have spent tens of millions of dollars of taxpayers' money bailing out an old, inefficient coal-fired power station. They would have put money into this generator. Anyone who has any knowledge of the energy system says that if you put money into one generator like that it is almost certain that you are going to have to put it into all generators. So, this would have snowballed into a massive amount of money that the opposition (if they were in government) would have been putting into many generators. It is wacky policy. They are the only ones who think this is at all clever. One is the loneliest number and that's why they are in opposition. They are the only ones who think that it's a great idea to be bailing out coal-fired generators.

What is absolutely embarrassing today for the opposition is the announcement of Pelican Point going back to full capacity, providing an extra 240 megawatts into the system. Again, people who know anything about this system seem to agree that that could not have happened, would not have happened under their policy of supporting inefficient coal-fired power stations. That is what is abundantly clear.